Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israel’s Genocide in Gaza? Let’s Talk about Something Else

Israel committed horrific massacres in Gaza. (Photo: via QNN)

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EDITORIAL | THE DISCOURSE ON GAZA: STATEHOOD, STARVATION, AND WESTERN INACTION

By Abraham A. van Kempen
20 August 2025

Performative Politics and Palestinian Statehood

The recent international recognition of Palestinian statehood is mainly symbolic and distracts from Gaza's humanitarian crisis. Politicians support a Palestinian state, but effective measures to stop violence and suffering are lacking. A viable state—including West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza—remains unreachable, as Israel refuses to relinquish its occupation without significant intervention, which seems impossible.

Instead, Palestinians are offered an administrative enclave within Gaza run by international and regional actors, not a sovereign state. Figures like Mahmoud Abbas lack broad support, with mandates extended through external interests rather than popular will. Recognition conditions—excluding Hamas, demilitarization, and ending support for families of martyrs and prisoners—limit sovereignty.

The right of occupied peoples to resist is enshrined in international law. However, Israel’s occupation and civilian casualties highlight the recurring pattern of occupation and resistance, with tragic consequences for both sides.

The Humanitarian Crisis: Siege, Starvation, and Denial

Before October 7, 2023, thousands of Gazan civilians had already been killed, and mass detentions without charge were common. The Hamas breakout from Gaza was a desperate act amid mounting deprivation and violence.

The Israeli blockade causes severe shortages of food, medicine, and supplies, leading to starvation. Despite images of malnourished children, officials deny famine. This denial campaign undermines facts, confuses observers, and hampers response. Gaza journalists, also deprived, face targeting and restrictions on global access to the truth.

Minimal aid deliveries are insufficient and often hindered by violence and obstruction. Starvation is reframed as an “other,” avoiding links to war crimes. While similar famines occurred elsewhere, in Gaza, a powerful state actively seeks to obscure the evidence.

Western Inaction and the Responsibility to Protect

While the "Responsibility to Protect” has prompted intervention in Libya and Serbia, no such action is planned in Gaza. Despite legal and moral reasons, including U.N. and ICJ rulings, the U.S. and allies block efforts to ease the crisis. Gaza's suffering exceeds thresholds that motivated previous interventions, but strategic and political factors hinder action.

Israel’s integration into Western strategies and its trauma fuel reluctance. This perpetuates violence, displacement, and starvation, while the world observes but does not intervene. Moral and legal duties are ignored, and Palestinian rights remain unaddressed.

Conclusion

Symbolic gestures, denial, and inaction shape the conversation around Gaza. The appearance of progress hides a worsening humanitarian crisis and ongoing breaches of international law. Until we recognize the root causes and the rights of the Palestinian people, real change will stay out of reach, and future generations will look back and judge how the world responded to this tragedy.
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Politicians who have done nothing to stop the genocide are now cashing in by joining the movement to recognize a Palestinian state. They say state, when, against US and Israeli obstruction, there is no possibility of a viable state being established.

A viable state would mean the West Bank, east Jerusalem, and Gaza, and there is absolutely no chance of Israel agreeing to that. Not a slim chance or a slight chance, but no chance at all, unless an international military force is mobilized to drive it out of the 1967 occupied territories and there’s no chance of that either.

What the Palestinians are going to get is an administrative enclave in Gaza. Australia, Canada, the UK, France and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian collaborator, are lining up as the figurehead leaders to run this enclave; they can call it whatever they like, but it won’t be a state in any realistic understanding of the word.

Apart from this, Abbas does not represent the Palestinian people. His mandate as an elected president ran out in 2009. A poll last year put his support at six percent. His constituency is not the Palestinian people but Israel and the governments that support it. He has turned himself into a human dish rag and when Israel has no more use for him, it will throw him away. Accordingly, Abbas’ survival technique is based on continuing to make himself useful.

As announced by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his government’s support for a Palestinian state is “predicated” on conditions presented by Abbas. These are that the Palestinian state recognizes Israel’s ‘right’ to exist (already conceded by Arafat back in the 1980s), that there will be no Hamas in government, that the state will be demilitarized, that general elections will be held and that the system of payment to the families of martyrs and prisoners will be ended.

Albanese welcomed the Arab League’s demand that the “terrorist” Hamas hand its weapons over to the PA before being driven “out of the region” once and for all.

In fact, Hamas is a resistance movement...

Read more: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza? Let’s Talk about Something Else
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ISRAEL’S STARVATION DENIAL IS AN ORWELLIAN FARCE

Source: Al-Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/8/9/israels-starvation-denial-is-an-orwellian-farce

By Daoud Kuttab
Published August 9, 2025

The Israeli ‘hasbara’ cannot disprove the obvious, but it can obfuscate and exhaust.

Six-month-old Palestinian Mohammed fights malnutrition in Gaza City on July 30, 2025 [Anadolu]

For more than 21 months, much of the international media danced around the truth about Israel’s war on Gaza. The old newsroom cliche – “if it bleeds, it leads” – seemed to apply, for Western media newsrooms, more to Ukraine than Gaza. When Palestinian civilians were bombed in their homes, when entire families were buried under rubble, coverage came slowly, cautiously, and often buried in “both sides” framing.

But when the images of starving Palestinian children began to emerge – haunting faces, skeletal limbs, vacant stares – something shifted. The photographs were too visceral, too undeniable. Western audiences were confronted with what the siege of Gaza truly means. And for once, the media’s gatekeepers could not entirely look away.

The world’s attention, however, alerted Israel, and a new “hasbara” operation was deployed. Hasbara means “explaining”, but in practice, it’s about erasing. With Tel Aviv’s guidance, pro-Israel media operatives set out to “debunk” the evidence of famine. The method was fully Orwellian: Don’t just contest the facts. Contest the eyes that see them.

We were told there is no starvation in Gaza. Never mind that Israeli ministers had publicly vowed to block food, fuel and medicine. Never mind that trucks were stopped for months, sometimes vandalised by Israeli settlers in broad daylight.

Israeli officials, speaking in polished English to Western media, assured the public this was all a Hamas fabrication, as though Hamas had somehow managed to trick aid agencies, foreign doctors and every journalist in Gaza into staging hunger.

The propaganda machine thought it had struck gold with one photograph. A New York Times image showed a skeletal boy, Mohammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq. Israeli intelligence sources whispered to friendly outlets: He’s not starving. He has a medical condition. As if that somehow makes his horrific condition acceptable.

The Times went ahead and added an editor’s note to “correct” the record...

Read more: Israel’s starvation denial is an Orwellian farce
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OPINION | ALL TALK, NO ACTION: WHY DOESN'T THE WEST INTERVENE IN GAZA?

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-08-13/ty-article-opinion/.premium/all-talk-no-action-why-doesnt-the-west-intervene-in-gaza/00000198-a271-dff4-a39e-abfb1f180000?lts=1755604478182

By Yagil Levy
Published August 13, 2025

Despite unprecedented civilian suffering and clear precedents for intervention, Western governments condemn Gaza's devastation but avoid any meaningful intervention

Protesters in Spain last month. Just two weeks ago, Israel invoked the "Responsibility to Protect" to defend Syria's Druze. Yet in Gaza, no one considers action against it.Credit: Paul White / AP

In September 2005, a UN summit approved the principle of the "Responsibility to Protect" – the duty of states to safeguard their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. When a government fails to do so, the international community has an obligation to use diplomatic, humanitarian, and other measures to protect the affected population. If necessary, the UN Security Council may impose sanctions or even authorize military force.

This principle was fully implemented in 2011, when the Security Council authorized the use of force against Libya to protect its citizens from crimes committed by their government.

Under normal circumstances, one might expect growing international pressure to apply the "Responsibility to Protect" in Gaza, once the sovereign responsible – the Palestinian Authority – failed to safeguard its people. Such pressure would likely include calls for sanctions and, if needed, military action.

This would be especially true after the March 2024 Security Council decision and the January 2024 International Court of Justice rulings (both requiring Israel to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza) went unfulfilled, and after Israel's repeated violations of international law: the destruction of Gaza, attacks on its residents, and mass displacement.

And yet, intervention is not even on the table. The U.S. is currently vetoing far more modest Security Council resolutions and recently blocked a proposal that, among other measures, called for lifting restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

By comparison, in 1999 (before the "Responsibility to Protect" was even formalized), NATO bypassed the Security Council and bombed Serbia to halt the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo. At that point, about 2,000 Albanian civilians had been killed – compared to at least 30,000 in Gaza today – and 350,000 displaced, versus roughly two million in Gaza. That level of suffering was enough for NATO leaders, led by U.S. President Bill Clinton, to deliver impassioned speeches about moral duty and invoke the memory of the Holocaust...

Read more: Opinion | All Talk, No Action: Why Doesn't the West Intervene in Gaza?