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Israel Uses Starvation As An Inhumane Weapon Of War.

"You'll get hell." How Israeli officials justify using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.

A photo essay by Humaira Ahad / PressTV

Israeli policy in Gaza is using starvation as a weapon of war, with regime officials openly advocating blockade tactics to displace, kill, and exterminate Palestinians.

The faces of starvation: Huda used to run barefoot across the courtyard. Now, she slumps against a wall, too weak to stand. She is one of over a million children enduring Israel's starvation campaign in Gaza.

Hunger as a weapon: This is not accidental. Israel has weaponized food, water, and medicine - turning hunger into a method of war. Over 100 Palestinians - 80 of them children - have already died from starvation and dehydration.

A policy with deep roots: "We'll deprive Gaza of water, and the Arabs will leave." - Levi Eshkol, Israeli Prime Minister, 1967. This policy didn't begin in 2023. It's decades old, and now more explicit than ever.

The 'Calorie Limit' strategy: In 2007 Israeli officials calculated the minimum calories Palestinians needed to avoid famine - then blocked food just above that line. "The idea is to put Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger," said Dov Weissglas, advisor to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Starvation goes public: Today, Israeli officials no longer hide it.

"Starve the Gazans and impose a siege to the max." - MK Moshe Saada

"The food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure." - Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir

"Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza - no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell." -- Gen. Ghassan Alian

Systematic deprivation: Fuel, food, and water are blocked. UN-cleared trucks are turned back or attacked. Officials brag about cutting off Gaza's lifelines.

"We don't give them food - they will have to leave." - Daniella Weiss

Dehumanization: "They are human animals. No electricity. No water. No gas. We are fighting animals." - Top Israeli Generals and Ministers.

This language is used to justify mass starvation.

Gaza's grim choice: "Stay and starve, or leave." That's the ultimatum. Not for Palestinian resistance fighters, but for over 2 million civilians, half of them children.

This is not war. It is extermination by hunger.

A Simple Solution To America's Housing Crisis.

On an average night in the United States, more than 770,000 people are homeless, and this number includes children as well as adults. Of course, that's just an estimate from government sources. The real number is likely much higher, as outreach teams are unable to count every homeless person, especially those who are technically without housing but have friends who let them sleep on the couch for a few nights or who live in cheap motels when they can afford it. It's not beyond reason to think we could have a million people in America with no permanent, safe place to call home. It's often assumed that homelessness is caused by mental health issues or drug & alcohol abuse, but in reality, the main contributors to homelessness are a lack of housing supply, rising home values, and unaffordable rent. There simply aren't enough houses or apartments available, and as a result, prices go up and the requirements to qualify for a home loan or to be approved for a lease become unattainable for more and more people. The situation has gotten so bad that tent cities have sprung up in urban areas while others are forced to live in their cars. It's unacceptable that the world's most powerful nation is unable, or unwilling, to make sure every citizen has a home.

As usual, government officials have no solutions to what should be a simple problem. Could this be because the housing industry, which donates big money to politicians, prefers to keep the housing supply tight in an effort to keep prices high?

Despite what industry lobbyists say, I believe homelessness can be eliminated fairly easily, by diverting existing government expenditures from war and foreign aid and into a domestic building program.

First, some numbers: according to Janover Multifamily Loans, the current cost to build a 200 unit apartment complex ranges from $50 million to $100 million in an average city (not including major markets such as Manhattan and San Francisco). Since we need the most units possible and not luxury complexes, let's use the lower estimate of $50 million.

Now let's look at where the money could come from. We give Israel $3.8 Billion per year, and since October 2023 we've spent more than $23 Billion in military costs to enable their genocide against the people of Gaza. In Israel alone, we've wasted nearly $27 Billion that could have been used to help American citizens right here within our own borders. That money could have built 540 apartment complexes totaling 108,000 units.

In 2024 we gave Ukraine $1.2 Billion, Jordan $1.1 Billion, Ethiopia $874 Million, DR Congo $843 Million, Somalia $706 Million, South Sudan $657 Million, and Yemen $602 Million. (We give hundreds of millions more to other countries throughout the world in addition to these.) The total for these seven is $5,982,000,000, or roughly $6 Billion to make it easier to compute. That amount of money could have built another 120 apartment complexes totaling 24,000 units.

That's 132,000 homes built using the money we send overseas in just over a year, and in most cases that money is sent year after year. If we did nothing else but keep that money here instead of giving it away, we could continue to build thousands of homes every year and have 770,000 ready in less than six years. That's enough to house all the homeless we estimate we have now, plus provide thousands of jobs in construction and manufacturing. Getting people housed would also reduce crime, it would clean up our cities, and it would give people the hope they need to keep them from turning to drugs & alcohol.

We could gain even more units if local governments would loosen regulations prohibiting the construction of tiny homes and relax building codes that drive up construction costs. Homes need to be safe, but they also need to be available. Regulations and codes are often used to protect a city's image, but they do little good when residents are sleeping on sidewalks or in tents.

Our problem isn't a lack of funds; it's a lack of will combined with misplaced priorities. A nation is made up of its people, and those people can't be productive and contribute to the strength of the nation if they're struggling to stay alive.

Some will say my idea is socialism, a point I can't deny. While I strongly oppose all forms of Marxist ideology, we have a crisis that can be solved using money we're already spending. We just need to spend it on something that actually helps America instead of sending it to other nations that give us nothing in return. With a national debt of $37 Trillion that rises every day, we can no longer afford to fix the world while our own nation crumbles. Our focus has to be at home, at least until our internal problems have been taken care of.

Further, the apartment homes I've proposed wouldn't be given to tenants for free. Rent would be charged sufficient to maintain the properties and possibly return some funds to the federal treasury, but that rent would be affordable to people working the service jobs that help keep our economy going. We all like the convenience of fast food, for example, but the cashiers and the cooks have to live somewhere local or the restaurants won't be able to stay open. And do you really want the guy who makes your food to be living in a tent with no running water?

Ultimately, once we've gotten out of crisis mode, we can stop building apartments and start repairing our neglected infrastructure and paying down our debt. But no money should go overseas (other than for legitimate emergency humanitarian aid) until we've gotten our own nation built back strong again.

Because a strong homeland is the best kind of national security.

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Addendum:

After I published this article, I received some comments on social media suggesting that the best solution to the housing crisis would be to deport the illegal immigrants. Although that seems logical, here's is the reply I posted to explain why mass deportations will never happen:

"To show the fallacy of Trump's deportation psyop, I did some research and found there are an estimated 18.6 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, almost 6% of the total population. That's as many people as the total population of Cambodia and twice as many as live in Israel, Austria, or Switzerland. Deporting even 1/4 of the illegals would crash our economy, something Trump knows. Stunts like the "Alligator Alley" deportation camp are part of the theater that creates the perception that Trump is tough on immigration. In reality, even if 3.7 million people were deported every year, it would take five years to finish the job. (That's 10,136 people PER DAY, every day, for five years).

I'm not pro-immigration, but the numbers don't lie. We have an economy that is dependent on illegals. It also depends on income from illegal drugs, but that's a story for another day."

So while Trump will continue with his highly publicized deportations, he's going for the "low-hanging fruit" and the most violent criminals. What he's doing through ICE is essentially theater for the masses as well as a form of social training that conditions us to the sight of heavily armed police roaming the nation looking for targets. It won't make a significant dent in the number of illegals living in America nor will it solve the housing crisis.

Zionists Made Genocide Cheap.

Amid Gaza’s deepening humanitarian crisis, Israels Zionist regime and the United States have turned hunger into a weapon and aid centers into slaughterhouses, where a loaf of bread is pursued at the risk of death.

Gaza genocide:

653 Days
59,029 Killed
142,135 Wounded
11,000 Missing
Last updated: July 21, 2025

The Complicity Of Silence.

Israel's immoral and illegal occupation of Palestine has resulted in a genocide unprecedented in modern history.

The atrocities now total:

55,297 killed

128,426 injured

11,000 missing

And more than half of the victims are said to be innocent children and women. This should come as no surprise considering Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin recently said:

“Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas. We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.”

If this is the morality of Judaism, we should question what kind of "god" they're praying to. But if this is just the rhetoric of a psychopathic society, why aren't Jews around the world rising up to declare, "Not in our name"?

And where are the Christian Zionists who claim to follow the teaching of Jesus yet turn and look away when Palestine is mentioned?

All I hear is the complicity of silence.

We Tried To Warn You.

But it's not too late to start.

The Moral Rot At The Heart Of Civilization.

by Nate Bear

This civilization is letting a genocide happen.

Israel and the west are to blame for the genocide but not one country, bar Yemen, has come to the material aid of the Palestinians.

Not one government in the entire world has done anything.

Shout-out to Hezbollah and a few militant groups in Iraq. Well done South Africa for bringing the ICC case against Netanyahu and his fellow Zionazis.

But no government on Earth used its state capacity, used its navy or its air force or its army to do anything to help the Palestinians.

A military mission to stop Israel would have been nice. No-fly zones and the like, with the threat of force. But in the absence of that, many of us would have settled for a humanitarian mission, a country or countries sending a fleet of ships and planes to deliver aid, come what may.

These vehicles could have been unarmed. The country or countries could have made it very clear to Israel this was solely a humanitarian mission, it would have called their bluff and created a stark binary choice: bomb unarmed aid ships of a nation state, effectively a declaration of war, or let them through.

But no, nothing. Looking at a list of the roughly two hundred countries in the world, well over half would have the capacity to send aid via air force or navy assets.

On the ladder of complicity in genocide, the western states supplying Israel with the military equipment and political cover for genocide sit on the top rung, but the countries with the greatest capacity to have done something, to have carried out a humanitarian mission, must sit on the next rung down.

In the end it has just been empty words of condemnation and a few symbolic gestures on trade.

In the end it has come down to a handful of activists on a crowdfunded sailing boat to be the moral conscience of the world and do something not one single country in the world did.

It’s hard to get your head around.

This inaction and apathy in the face of an actual genocide, in response to twenty months of 4k videos of children being shredded, blown up, ripped apart, beheaded, burnt alive and starved, signals a deeper moral rot at the heart of our societies.

A moral rot that cannot be separated from neo-liberalism and how money and profit have come to dominate our brains, dominate our political systems and dominate our world.

When it comes to a unifying vision for society, the only thing most of us ever hear from our governments is one word: growth.

Growth is the spiritual center around which the entirety of our politics is orientated. And it doesn’t mean anything at all! We can’t be richer. We have all the food and technology and money we could possibly need. We have never lived in more abundant times. The richest people are richer than countries. Footballers and tennis players are billionaires. The idea that if we just had another one, five, ten percent of economic growth we could create that extra bit more we need and solve all the problems is actually a comical insult to our intelligence.

Yet this is the myth and the legend that underpins all of modern politics. This is the story that so many people fall for and buy in to. Growth is the secular religion for an areligious age. And as such, it must be worshiped. Anything that creates growth is to be lauded and encouraged, and anything that hampers it is to be rejected. To speak out against growth is a crime against the religion.

Even a genocide must be no obstacle to growth.

Which is why, just a few days after the UK’s defense secretary David Lammy said the country had suspended trade talks with Israel (because even the genocide enablers in the British government couldn’t justify starving children), the UK’s trade envoy to Israel was live tweeting from Tel Aviv about his trade mission to the country.

The moral cesspit of neo-liberalism looks at a genocide on the one hand, and a percentage point of growth on the other, and chooses growth every time.

A few weeks ago I revealed that the son of the attorney general for the Conservative Party in the UK, (Lord) David Wolfson, who was a minister in Boris Johnson’s government, is a soldier in the IDF. Sam Wolfson went to Israel to join the IDF in 2022, participated in the genocide, and only returned to London earlier this year. He’s now working at the right-wing neo-liberal think tank Policy Exchange, because killing civilians and doing a new holocaust, rather than being an obstacle to a career path, is a valued skill. The more death you create, the more doors you open and the richer and more powerful you can be.

Neo-liberalism enthusiastically rewards death-eating immorality.

Just look around!

From Donald Trump to Elon Musk to Tony Blair to Joe Biden to Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel to Jeff Bezos to the bank bosses to the arms company bosses to the fossil fuel CEOs. Boringly the list goes on and on and on and on. Some of quite literally the worst people in the history of the world with the most blood on their hands are the richest people with the most power.

Neo-liberal economics has created a moral cesspit of a civilization in which there’s no financial upside in stopping a genocide.

On the contrary, the financial upside is in genocide.

From the American mercenaries running the sham aid distributions centers in Gaza, to the software being provided by Google, Microsoft and Meta to smooth the genocide, to the AI being provided by Palantir to track the Palestinians, to the missiles being provided by Lockheed Martin to liquify them.

The money is in the killing, not the saving.

The money is in the enabling, not the stopping.

The money is in the trade deals and the good relations.

Morality is all downside.

This is why I cannot stand to look at the faux moral posturing over Ukraine by the west. The truth? The money is in keeping that war going, funding Ukraine, rearming Europe. Latest estimates are that the war has caused 1.4 million casualties. These are absolutely horrifying numbers. Wanting more dead young men isn’t moral. Supporting Ukraine has nothing to do with good or bad, right or wrong. It’s only about blood money, resources and strategic interests.

And this moral cesspit of a civilization is one in which we all swim, whether we like it or not.

How many times have you said to someone “X should happen because it would be good” or “Y shouldn’t happen because it’s bad” and their sincere response, hollowed of all morality, has been along the lines of: but who would pay for it/there’s no money in it.

Our brains and value systems have been rewired to think about the world only in terms of money and profit.

This is why the foundations of our existence as biological beings - the air, the soil, the water - are being demolished. The money is in death, not in life. Good or bad and right or wrong don’t enter the calculation.

It’s hard to look at this civilization, a civilization tearing down the pillars of our own existence, a civilization that allowed a genocide to happen in such a visible way, and see any redeeming features.

People are worth saving. Beauty is worth saving. The animals and the rivers and the seas and the ecology are worth saving. But from the political to the economic to the legal, institutionally there’s nothing worth saving.

The liberals and the centrists have had their shot at reforming this mess. But the contradictions at the heart of their ideology (capitalists, but good ones!) couldn’t be resolved, and they’ve only ended up perpetuating the horrors of the system.

I’ve said it before but I’ve never felt it more keenly than after watching the west collaborate on genocide and the rest of the world do nothing to stop it: the future will be radically pro-social and anti-capitalist or there won’t be a future at all.

[republished by permission of Nate Bear / 'Do Not Panic' on Substack]