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By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The fascist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to wage war on Gaza civilians, in the longest and most intense violation of the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute and other elements of International Humanitarian Law in this century.
The United Nations Human Rights office in the Occupied Palestinian territories recently revealed that the Israeli military continues to subject the al-Mawasi region in western Khan Younis to military strikes, which for the most part “appear to target directly makeshift tents” and so manage to wipe out entire families. The UN says, “Between 18 March and 16 June 2025, OHCHR recorded 112 attacks on Al Mawasi, killing 380 people, including at least 158 women and children.”
At the same time, sadistic commanders are ordering Palestinian civilians from other parts of Gaza to go to “known shelters” in that very Al Mawasi area where such shelters are being bombarded.
Since last March when Israel violated the ceasefire negotiated by the Trump administration, its minions have forced over 300,000 people into Al Mawasi, an area of about 3.5 square miles. There are now 425,000 people huddling there, mostly in so-called “tents” — really just odd bits of plastic and cloth. And they are sometimes being shot at like fish in a barrel, even as Israel’s military attacks in Rafah and Khan Younis have become more intense.
At the same time, Israeli commanders continue deliberately to starve the civilian population, continuing in some form a blockade on staples they began on March 2, when they began violating the ceasefire arranged by President Trump, according to Amnesty International. The blockade on food and other aid has been only slightly adjusted in recent weeks, leaving many people hungry — including children.
That’s right, Israel is deliberately starving children. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated in mid-June that 18,741 children have been hospitalized for acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year. And mind you, few hospitals are functioning even at a basic level in Gaza, because Israeli troops have deliberately destroyed them. The harried doctors and nurses who haven’t been assassinated by the Israeli army are trying to deal with those injured in the war, and you wonder if they can do much for children with stick-like arms and distended bellies. They don’t have food aid to give out, and what food there is has become extremely expensive. That is, by the way, typical of famine situations, which usually develop not because there is no food at all but because people cannot afford what little there is. That is how a million Irish died during the Potato Famine in the mid-nineteenth century, when British landlords continued to export food from the country.
Amnesty quotes Susan Maarouf of the Benevolent Friend Patient Hospital in Gaza City: “But this year for us the situation began to drastically get worse again in April. Since then, out of approximately 200-250 children we have screened daily for malnutrition. Nearly 15% showed signs associated with severe or moderate malnutrition.” They exhibited signs such as “pale skin, falling hair and nails, and alarming weight loss.”
There are a million minors in Gaza, so we could be talking about 150,000 children with malnutrition, if Maarouf’s sample is representative.
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Juan Cole
Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).