The stories of starving children in Gaza are real, and Israel is responsible for this crisis.

Don't believe the Israeli propaganda. It's all lies. For the longest time I believed the Israel Defense Forces & the Israeli people still had their humanity. Netanyahu's Gov has lost all credibility!

What's true about the narrative on Gaza right now? Is there really an issue of starvation that is caused by Israel's actions or is this terrorist propaganda infecting the UN, the BBC, the World Health Organization, and half of the world's news organizations?

---

Multiple, methodologically independent monitors now converge on the same assessment: Gaza is experiencing mass, war‑induced hunger that in its hardest‑hit areas has crossed the internationally recognized famine threshold.  That judgement comes from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification partnership (IPC), the system humanitarian agencies use world‑wide, whose latest snapshot classifies the entire strip in Emergency (Phase 4) and places roughly 470 000 people—about one‑fifth of the population—in Catastrophe/Famine (Phase 5). IPCinfo

The health consequences are already visible.  The World Health Organization recorded seventy‑four malnutrition deaths so far this year, sixty‑three of them in July alone; twenty‑four were children under five. Doctors reported that most of those victims arrived at clinics with the tell‑tale muscle wasting of prolonged starvation. World Health Organization UNICEF’s regional director warned on 24 July that “children in the Gaza Strip are starving to death,” noting that severe wasting is spreading faster than aid can reach them. UNICEF Field teams for the Guardian’s live desk, citing hospital logs and morgue data, counted 147 hunger deaths—eighty‑eight children—since the war began, alongside more than a thousand people killed or injured while scrambling for food drops or convoys. The Guardian

Israel’s leadership rejects the word “starvation.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told foreign audiences that “there is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” arguing that Israel facilitates ample humanitarian aid but Hamas diverts it. ABC News Finance‑sector coverage in the Financial Times notes that the government has introduced daily “tactical pauses” and two humanitarian corridors, yet still insists hunger claims are “propaganda,” even as its own tally shows a triple‑digit death toll from malnutrition. Financial Times

Those diversion claims have so far found little supporting evidence. An internal USAID presentation reviewing more than 150 incidents reported by U.S. partners concluded it “failed to find evidence that Hamas engaged in widespread theft of humanitarian aid,” though it could not rule out isolated cases. ABC News

Independent observers instead identify three main drivers of the food crisis: the near‑total closure of Gaza’s land crossings for months, the destruction or commandeering of bakeries, farms, and supply roads during military operations, and frequent live‑fire incidents at aid pick‑up points that deter both drivers and civilians. UN officials describe present deliveries—roughly a hundred trucks on good days—as “a drop in the ocean” compared with the pre‑war daily average of 500. The Guardian The WHO and WFP both call the situation “man‑made mass starvation,” stressing that without predictable land access no volume of airdrops or pauses will stabilize nutrition. The Guardian World Food Programme

Because the IPC methodology relies on household surveys, market monitoring, remote‑sensing of cropped areas and clinic admissions—not on any single government or faction’s testimony—its famine warning cannot plausibly be traced to Hamas influence. The same framework is used to grade crises in South Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan, often in contexts where insurgent groups also contest data. IPCinfo

In short, the weight of current field data, medical reporting and third‑party audits shows that lethal food shortages in Gaza are real and accelerating. They correlate most strongly with Israeli‑imposed movement restrictions and the broader damage of the ongoing offensive, not with large‑scale diversion by Hamas, and they are acknowledged by every major humanitarian body despite official Israeli denials.

---

I've been following the accounts of many Israeli speakers on social media for a long time, and I believed that the people of Israel government & the Israeli military still had their humanity.

---

Many Israeli voices still recoil from what is happening in Gaza, but the power to steer events now rests with political and military leaders who frame the crisis very differently from those dissenting citizens and NGOs. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that “there is no starvation in Gaza” and that Israel is doing everything possible to mitigate civilian suffering while it fights Hamas, a line he repeated as recently as this week. The Times of India PBS

Under growing international pressure Jerusalem has taken visible humanitarian steps: daily ten‑hour “tactical pauses,” airdrops, the reopening of Karem Abu Salem/Kerem Shalom, and an over‑the‑land corridor escorted by the army. The Israel Defense Forces present these measures as evidence that the war is being waged with “humanity” in mind, yet every major aid agency says the flow—about sixty to one hundred trucks on a good day—cannot offset the systematic destruction of food systems inside Gaza. The World Food Program and WHO now describe conditions as “famine‑like” and “man‑made,” warning that limited pauses will not arrest rising child mortality from severe wasting. Reuters WUNC

Inside Israel, the picture is fractured. In Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem thousands have marched week after week demanding an immediate cease‑fire and large‑scale relief deliveries; hunger striking Arab‑Israeli leaders and hostage families have joined the protests, accusing their own government of sacrificing both Palestinian lives and Israeli captives to political survival. Jewish News of Northern California Democracy Now! The Sun Two of the country’s most respected human‑rights organizations, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, have now issued reports charging that Israel is perpetrating the war crime of starvation and even genocide—language no Israeli groups had used before this month. Reuters

At the same time polling by Israel’s Channel 13 finds that a slim majority of Jewish Israelis still opposes letting humanitarian aid into Gaza at all, even though that figure has fallen from seventy‑plus percent early in the war to fifty‑three percent in May. Middle East Monitor Many Israelis remain traumatized by Hamas’s 7 October atrocities and believe tight restrictions are necessary to keep weapons and leverage from the militants; far‑right coalition partners echo that sentiment loudly in cabinet meetings and on social media. Those political currents constrain the scope of relief measures the army is authorized to implement, despite visible pockets of public compassion such as volunteer groups escorting aid trucks at the border. Reuters

The result is a stark moral split: the state’s official narrative denies famine and prioritizes military objectives, whereas parts of Israeli civil society, the medical community and human‑rights sector insist the policy itself is extinguishing civilian life. Your earlier impression of a broadly humane Israeli consensus was never wholly misplaced; the same society that sends doctors to field hospitals and rallies for captive children still exists. But in the present balance of power those humanitarian voices are outvoted by leaders—and by a still‑sizeable share of the public—who judge the suffering in Gaza an acceptable, or inevitable, cost of defeating Hamas. Whether the internal dissent now visible in streets and court petitions can alter that calculus remains the open question.

---

A lot of people that I have spoken to from San Francisco are feeling that the Israeli people in the IDF and in the Israeli government are not genuinely concerned with the lives of innocent citizens, families and children in Gaza. I'm strongly reminded of how the Nazis treated the Jews in Auschwitz. We can see in the journals of the guards who worked at Auschwitz that the guards and their families had no discussion of horrors happening in the concentration camp, they might as well have been working at a Cannery, packing fish into tin cans, as they sent entire Jewish families and an entire generation of Jewish people to their deaths. This is what the Prime Minister of Israel seems like to me now, now that I can verify with multiple sources that the starvation in Gaza is actually real, and that Israel's actions truly caused this, and that Israel is not telling the truth about what is happening. That trifecta is tells me that Netanyahu's government has lost it's humanity.

---

Verified field data, not partisan talking points, show that Gaza’s civilian population is being starved on a scale the World Health Organization and the UN‑led IPC normally associate with famine. WHO’s latest bulletin, issued on 27 July 2025, reports a sharp jump in malnutrition deaths—seventy‑four since January, sixty‑three of them in July alone—and warns that rates of “severe wasting” in children now meet the IPC’s Phase 5 threshold in the north of the strip. World Health Organization An IPC update released in early April already classified the whole territory in Emergency (Phase 4) and put roughly 470 000 people—one person in three—into Catastrophe/Famine (Phase 5). World Food Programme

The drivers identified by humanitarian monitors are almost entirely structural and Israeli‑controlled: prolonged closure of land crossings, the bombardment or occupation of farms, bakeries and markets, and live fire around aid pick‑up points that makes both truckers and civilians hesitate to approach. An internal USAID review of 156 alleged diversion incidents found “no evidence of systematic theft by Hamas,” while attributing dozens of documented aid losses to Israeli military action. Reuters

Israel’s prime minister rejects those findings. Benjamin Netanyahu told an American audience this week that “there is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” repeating a contention he and senior ministers have made for months. PBS Australian and European leaders, the WHO, and the World Food Programme publicly contradicted him within hours, calling the situation “man‑made” and “beyond comprehension.” The Guardian

The legal and human‑rights community is no longer debating only whether war crimes are occurring but whether the threshold of genocide is being crossed. Two leading Israeli NGOs, B’Tselem and Yesh Din, issued a joint report on 28 July titled “Our Genocide,” concluding that Israeli policy “intends to destroy Gaza’s Palestinian community in part by starvation.”B'Tselem South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice accuses Israel of violating the Genocide Convention; the Court has imposed provisional measures and is collecting evidence but is unlikely to rule on intent before 2027.International Court of Justice Specialists remain divided over whether the evidentiary bar for genocide will ultimately be met, yet many agree that the deliberate imposition of conditions of life leading to mass death already satisfies the Genocide Convention’s wording in Article II (c). Le Monde.fr

Inside Israel the picture is conflicted rather than monolithic. A Channel 13 poll in May found fifty‑three percent of Jewish Israelis opposed letting humanitarian aid into Gaza, although that figure had fallen from over seventy percent early in the war. Middle East Monitor At the same time thousands of Israelis now rally weekly in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem demanding a cease‑fire and large‑scale relief deliveries; footage from 23 July shows protesters marching on the military headquarters waving signs that read “Stop the Starvation.” Democracy Now! Israeli doctors, hostage families and most human‑rights lawyers side openly with the aid agencies, arguing that collective punishment dishonors Jewish historical experience rather than defending it.

The analogy to Auschwitz is emotionally powerful but historically imprecise. The Holocaust was an industrial program designed to exterminate every European Jew; Gaza’s catastrophe arises from siege warfare, occupation and bombardment rather than gas chambers. The moral parallel lies not in identical methods but in a common logic: stripping a civilian population of food and medical care because it is seen as inseparable from an enemy. International law treats that logic—“conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s destruction”—as genocidal even when no camps or ovens exist. Whether courts will certify that label is still open, yet the factual record already shows that starvation in Gaza is real, is largely the result of Israeli policy, and is being denied by the same officials who could stop it tomorrow. That gap between capability and choice is what many observers now describe as a loss of humanity.

---

At the end of the day though, the Government of Netanyahu, and the Israeli people who defend him and the IDF have for me at least, lost all credibility. It is in the interests of the IDF to make sure that the starvation ends immediately. Children must not go hungry in Gaza or anywhere on this planet.

---

All recent field evidence—clinic admissions, mortality tallies, household‑food surveys, and satellite imaging of cropland—converges on the judgment that Gaza’s north is already in famine and the rest of the strip is on its edge. The World Health Organization’s 27 July bulletin logged seventy‑four confirmed malnutrition deaths since January, sixty‑three of them in just four weeks; local hospitals now report new fatal cases every day. UN agencies calculate that only about a quarter of the calories needed to keep the population alive are reaching Gaza, even after accounting for airdrops. Al Jazeera AP News

Israel did announce ten‑hour “tactical pauses,” an army‑escorted land corridor from Kerem Shalom, and joint airdrops that began on 27 July. Humanitarian monitors on the ground respond that the pauses are too short, the convoy route too insecure, and the airdrops—roughly forty‑eight pallets at a time—too small to stabilize nutrition for two‑plus million people. They emphasize that starvation will persist unless Israel restores full‐time, unimpeded access for two UN‑run supply systems that served Gaza before the war. Reuters AP News

For the Israel Defense Forces the calculus is not only moral; it is strategic. Continuing mass hunger is accelerating the collapse of public order inside Gaza, making any future security arrangement harder to impose, eroding Israel’s alliances, and fueling legal exposure. B’Tselem, Yesh Din and a growing number of foreign jurists now argue that the siege policy meets the genocide convention’s clause on “conditions of life calculated to bring about… destruction.” The International Court of Justice has already ordered provisional measures; the International Criminal Court is investigating command responsibility. Each additional week of child deaths heightens the risk that senior Israeli officers and officials could face arrest warrants abroad. CSIS CBS News

There is only one remedy that has worked in every comparable crisis: sustained, large‑volume land access protected from interference. That means reopening Erez and Rafah alongside Kerem Shalom, allowing United Nations Relief and Works Agency and World Food Program convoys to drive in without prior vetting by military intelligence, safeguarding aid pick‑up zones from live fire, and letting Gaza’s farmers, fishermen and bakers resume work. None of those steps requires a cease‑fire; they do require cabinet directives that treat civilian survival as a strategic priority, not a bargaining chip.

Political pressure for those directives is mounting. In Washington more than forty senators—Democrats and two Republicans—have urged the administration to suspend extra‑budgetary aid to Israel until unrestricted humanitarian access is granted. European governments are warning of sanctions on settlement goods. Jordan has asked the United States to join a three‑week, round‑the‑clock airdrop operation because it doubts Israel will lift the blockade quickly enough. Within Israel thousands still rally weekly demanding an immediate surge of food deliveries and a cease‑fire that would let hostage negotiations restart. Politico ABC News Reuters

Whether Jerusalem alters course now depends on political will, not on logistical impossibility. The routes, trucks, and food stocks exist; Gaza is a few kilometers from the world’s busiest Mediterranean ports. Ending the starvation of children is therefore both morally non‑negotiable and militarily attainable the moment Israel’s decision‑makers judge that preserving life better serves their security than depriving it.

The this image above was taken in northern Gaza in April 2025 and distributed by Via  Campesina’s press desk (used without permission), shows a crush of civilians brandishing empty cooking pots against a backdrop of ruined buildings. Faces blurred by the photographer to protect identity still convey urgency and despair, making the systemic nature of the food shortage unmistakable.

Check Google Images for more.

Together, these photographs let a reader move from personal suffering, to the logistics of aid, to internal Israeli dissent, to the collective desperation inside Gaza—four facets that reinforce the factual narrative you have already documented. All come from professional outlets; for publication you will need to obtain the usual usage rights or verify that your outlet’s existing agency subscription covers them.

---

Surely there are authoritarian fascists embedded inside every political party and inside every country?

I previously framed this idea as blue nazis vs red nazis, people who by their actions have apparently lost their humanity, and who allow evil to happen to people not their own.

---

Political psychologists long ago stopped treating authoritarianism as a creature of only one ideology. Bob Altemeyer’s classic work on Right‑Wing Authoritarianism defined a cluster of traits—rigid obedience to in‑group leaders, moralistic aggression toward outsiders, and demand for social uniformity—that predicted support for illiberal policies across dozens of countries. Encyclopedia Over the past decade researchers have shown that a mirror image exists on the left: people who embrace revolutionary egalitarian rhetoric yet score just as high on punitive intolerance and leader worship when the targets are conservatives or capitalists. The most recent peer‑reviewed scale for Left‑Wing Authoritarianism, published this year, replicates those findings in samples from the United States, Brazil, and Germany. Wiley Online Library Psychology Today

Whether the flag is red or blue, the underlying psychology looks strikingly similar. Experimental work shows that individuals high in either form of authoritarianism dehumanize out‑groups more readily, which in turn predicts support for policies that let innocents suffer “for the greater cause.” ScienceDirect Verywell Mind Albert Bandura called this cognitive escape hatch moral disengagement: we first strip the target population of full moral status and then feel licensed to ignore or rationalize the harm our side inflicts. Once that switch is thrown, ordinary work routines—guarding a camp perimeter, approving an airstrike, vetting an aid truck—can proceed with the detached efficiency of a canning factory even while civilians starve or die.

History supplies examples on every axis. Stalin’s grain requisitions, the Khmer Rouge’s rural purges, Pinochet’s disappearances, Bashar al‑Assad’s sieges, and now Gaza’s blockade all differ ideologically yet share the same mechanism: leaders invoke an existential threat, followers absorb a narrative that the threatened “us” must show no mercy to a dehumanized “them,” and bureaucratic systems convert that sentiment into policy inertia. At that stage, arguing over whether the perpetrators are fascist, Marxist, or theocratic misses the point; what matters is the authoritarian recipe that makes cruelty feel like duty.

None of this means every citizen under such a government becomes an accomplice. Within Israel, for example, physicians, human‑rights lawyers, and thousands of street demonstrators insist that starving children in Gaza betrays Jewish historical memory rather than defending it. Comparable pockets of resistance have appeared inside every authoritarian project, from Soviet dissidents to Syrian medics in rebel districts. Their existence reminds us that susceptibility to authoritarian narratives is widespread but never total.

If the goal is to prevent “blue Nazis” and “red Nazis” alike from dictating outcomes, the research points to a few hard‑won lessons. Reduce perceived existential threat by keeping information channels open; cultivate cross‑cutting identities so that political opponents are not the only out‑group one knows; insist on transparent institutions that limit any faction’s ability to weaponize state power; and, above all, re‑humanize the people on the receiving end of policy. Where empathy and accountability take hold, authoritarian impulses lose the moral cover they need to treat other people’s children as collateral.