A Palestinian mother clutches her skeletal child to her chest. The child’s eyes are gaunt, almost popping out of her face and looks you in the eye. You can’t look away despite the shiver that runs down your spine. The child’s spine is visible, jutting out of the malnourished little body. It’s only skin on bones, the bones from the emaciated body of the child jut out almost breaking through the skin, the spine is tender as though it’s about to crack. The Palestinian mother clutches the child closer to her chest. This unconditional tenderness of a mother’s love strikes a chord with every mother in the world. What pain can be more brutal to the heart of a mother than to watch her child die before her own eyes, starve over a period of time, reduced to just skeletal bones, hearing the suffering pangs of hunger and thirst every minute, every hour, every day for months and slowly, agonizingly watching her baby perish to death.
The image is striking, it pierces the human heart. Nothing is more repulsive to the human heart than the suffering, pain and killing of a child. And over the last week, this slaughter of children through mass starvation is being played out in real time and the world is witnessing this horror on their smartphones and TV screens. At least one hundred and thirteen Palestinians have died from starvation and dehydration, eighty one of them children. Just in this year 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry records twenty eight thousand six hundred and seventy seven registered cases of children suffering from malnutrition. Furthermore 260 000 children are in urgent and desperate need of nutrition.
The infantcidal character of the Genocide is not only inhumane, criminal, cold and callous but deliberate and intentional. At the beginning of the Genocide, on November 10th 2023, the Israeli Defence minister Yaov Gallant expressed the government’s genocidal intent when he said that “There will be no food, no electricity, no fuel, everything is closed, we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”. Israel has acted according to its expressed Genocidal intent as the images of dead starving bodies of children haunt the collective conscience of the world. Israel has done exactly what it said it would do more than twenty months ago. Why is everyone then pretending to be shocked and expressing concern today about children starving to death?
Israeli General Ghassan Alian said “Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell. This hate speech is not only racist and repulsive but it exhibits the arrogance of the supremacist white settler mentality. Why do well fed rich white powerful men like Netanyahu, Trump and Allian think that they are Godlike and can impose hell on poor people? Are they so arrogant that they believe that they can usurp God’s authority and create Hell on earth?
Israeli Minister Itama Ben Gvir proclaimed “The food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure”.
Avigdor Lieberman, former deputy prime minister and finance minister said in August 2024 “The only arrangement to be made with Gaza is to stop all transfers of humanitarian aid, equipment, fuel, electricity and water”.
Revital Gottlieb said in October 2023 “Without hunger and thirst among the Gaza population, we will not be able to recruit collaborators, we will not be able to recruit intelligence, and we will not be able to bribe people with food, drink, medicine in order to obtain intelligence”.
These words point to the deliberate weaponisation of starvation as a means of gathering intelligence.
Israeli Knesset member Moshe Saada in April 2025 said “Starve the Gazan’s and impose a siege to the Max”
Israeli settler leader and former Mayor Daniella Weiss said in January 2024 “They will move. The Arabs will move. We don’t give them food, we don’t give the Arabs anything. They will have to leave”. These words express the strategic aim of the Zionist state, to ethnic cleanse and forcibly expel the people of Gaza, using starvation as a strategic weapon. This is clearly and concisely expressed by former Israeli General Giora Eiland in October 2023 “The people of Gaza should be told that they have two choices, to stay and to starve or to leave”.
For more than twenty months the leadership of the Israeli military and political establishment have verbalized using starvation as a weapon of war.
Some believe that this racist policy of starving the occupied Palestinians only emerged after October 7th 2023. It is true that Israel has used the October 7th attacks to justify its Genocide in Gaza and go in for the kill by starving Palestinians to death. However Israel’s weaponisation of starvation did not begin in October 2023. In 1997, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol said “We will deprive Gaza of water and the Arabs will leave”.
In 2007, Israeli’s actually calculated the minimum calories Palestinians needed to avoid famine and blocked food just above this line. Dav Weissglass, adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister said “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. The immunity that the World has given Israel historically and specifically after October 7th enabled Israel’s impunity as it today deliberately starves Palestinian children to death. The Genocidal green light has shifted Israel policy from using starvation to a point of just about avoiding famine to pursuing a policy that creates a famine and kills children. Even as Palestinian children are dying in large numbers, the Western Powers have not even imposed sanctions on the Zionist state, allowing for further Israeli impunity and more suffering for the children of Gaza.
The U.N. report of 2022 found that one year before that, 65% of Gazan’s were food insecure as a result of the unlawful siege Israel imposed with the tacit complicity of the Egyptian government as well as the U.S and Europe. At the beginning of the Israeli Genocide in Gaza, Oxfam reported that only 2% of the usual amount of food was being delivered to Gaza. Oxfam’s Sally Abi Khalil stated that “There can be no justification for using starvation as a weapon of war”. The Zionist state of Israel has been determined in strategically using starvation as a weapon of war.
Apart from banning UNRWA and its four hundred aid distribution points, Israeli forces have also been targeting agricultural land in Gaza, food production factories and grocery stores through the war. This is a cold, calculated and callous strategy to starve the people of Gaza. Alex de Waal, author of “Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine”, says “while it may be possible to bomb a hospital by accident, it is not possible to create a famine by accident’. So when you see the dead skeletal bodies of Palestinian children, know for sure that they have been deliberately killed by Israel.
The people of world are calling for a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli barbarism in Gaza but the Governments of the World are not acting. The United States, Israel’s primary military and economic backer, has throughout the invasion of Gaza, green lighted the actions of the Israeli State and still refuses to leverage its financial and military aid to compel Israel to comply with international human rights and humanitarian law. Everyone knows that without a complete ceasefire, it is impossible for aid to reach all the people of Gaza who desperately need it.
Despite the Israeli genocide, Palestinians are defiant, they do not accept to be subjugated, subordinates and slaves to Israeli colonial masters. The suffering triggers a memory in their historical consciousness as they remember their beloved Prophet who was also sanctioned, sieged and starved in Shee’b Abi Talib where the Prophet (p.b.u.h) and his comrades were starved to the point where they too had to eat grass in order to survive. The Prophet lost his most beloved and committed comrades, his wife Khadija and the defiant AbuTalib who died as a result of the policy of siege and starvation.
On the day of Justice, when the Creator, the most Just will ask “For what crime was the innocent child starved to death and killed? One wonders what defence the Israeli killers will present? A superior chosen race defence will not suffice before a God who created all human beings equally. And those who are in power both in the Arab and Western World, how will they reply when they are asked “Why did you not come to the defence and aid of children who cried out rescue us from this oppressive regime who are baby killers and starving us to death”. Inaction and silence is complicity to infanticide and genocide. The darkest and deepest depths of Hellfire is the appropriate eternal abode for baby killers and those who are complicit in starving children to death.
Guitar maestro Eric Clapton who in solidarity painted his guitar in Palestinian colours and blasted Israel for its killing of Palestinian children, after losing his young child wrote “Tears in Heaven” with heart wrenching lyrics that capture the anguish of a parent losing a child “Would you hold my hand if I saw in heaven, would you help me stand if I saw you in heaven, I know there won’t be more tears in heaven”. Perhaps this is the only solace for the suffering Palestinian mother knowing, there won’t be more tears in heaven.
Iqbal Suleiman
Suleman is a social justice lawyer and former head of the law clinic for Lawyers for Human Rights in Pretoria and Research Associate: Media Review Network