Gaza is a mirror that reflects the absolute shame of the world

Netanyahu was allowed to turn food into leverage and to treat the relief of a besieged population as a prize to be exchanged. This is not just immoral or illegal, it is obscene.

Razan Abu Zaher starved.

She was four years old.

She died on the floor of a ruined hospital with her tiny ribs rising and down like too fragile wings to be erected. Her body had no fat to burn. His eyes were back. His voice – rather a whisper of laughter – had disappeared a long time ago.

She didn’t die fast. She died slowly.

She died observed by her mother, who begged for her to stay firm. Observed by a doctor who had no more syringes, no physiological serum, no words, and by a world that tuned and then walked away.

Her death was not a tragedy. It was a sentence, written not in a hurry, but based on policy.

Razan is not alone. She is one among thousands.

Between March and June – already in full block – the UN Palestinian refugees agency, Unrwa, examined more than 74,000 children in Gaza. More than 5,500 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition. More than 800 were already in critical condition.

This happened months after the food was declared a threat. After the flour turned smuggling and the milk became memory, now children die in their parents’ arms.

Mothers hold babies who no longer cry.

Parents dug graves with their own hands, whispering lullays in dust.

Gaza was besieged by hunger, death, Arab betrayal and international betrayal.

Those who do not die from bombs are starving – or disease.

And in the background: shots. Because even hunger is safe in Gaza.

Armed hunger

This is not hunger. This is armed hunger. The deliberate strangulation of a people – not with strings, but with bureaucracy.

Not just bombs, but with bureaucracy.

Israel Bombarda Bakeries, bombardia humanitarian aid trains, destroys farms and blocks shipping with logistics sabotage foods.

It kills hunger Gaza as accurately it uses to kill it.

Yes, the story knows hunger as a weapon, but what is happening in Gaza has no precedents.

Never in recent history was a civilian population confined in a range of land surrounded, without food, water and fuel, while it was bombarded by air, earth and sea.

This is not a siege. It is the first televised extermination in the world.

A concentration camp under constant air strike.

In Bosnia, hunger was used to break the will. In the Omaroska extermination camp, 700 of the 6,000 detainees starved and torture.

In Srebranica, the food was deliberately denied. A Serbian-Bosnian soldier admitted: “We realized that it was not with the smuggled weapons for Srebrica we should worry about, but with the food.”

Before Bosnia, the Nazi Plan to Combat Hunger sought to exterminate Jews and Soviet civilians. Seven million people died – not as a consequence, but on purpose.

As sociologist Martin Shaw notes, Israel is following the pattern of Nazi genocide, as described by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: “A daily struggle, literally, for bread and physical survival,” which would “damage general and national thinking.”

This is not just an attack on the bodies. It is a war against consciousness.

Hungry journalists

Hunger that was not just intended to kill, but to destroy the ability to think, to organize, to have hope.

Even journalists are starving.

Al Jazeera correspondents expressed their own hunger: “We bring the news as we are hungry. We have found nothing to eat since yesterday.”

When the observer becomes the victim, when hunger swallows the narrator, the story went from the crisis – he reached the catastrophe.

Even so, Palestinians continue to queue to get food, totally aware of the deadly risk.

They enter what they became hunger traps of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), places orchestrated by the Israeli army.

They will get a bag of flour and return as corpses.

On Sunday, 115 Palestinians were shot dead while seeking help. Ninety -two of them tried to collect food.

Nineteen were children.

Since May 27, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 5,000 have been injured at GHF distribution points, where Israeli forces open fire against hungry civilians.

An emanated father, crying, holding his son’s bloody body – was filmed after being shot while waiting for flour.

He didn’t shouted.

He simply packed the boy in his arms as his shots crackled behind him, whispering his name – because it was all that was left.

This is not a humanitarian crisis. It is extermination by hunger. And yet the world insists that this is war.

Who are the culprits?

It is not war. It is annihilation – choreographed, prolonged and allowed.

Who are the culprits?

Israel throws the bombs and closes the gates. The United States pay for weapons and protect them with vetoes.

But the bond – the tightening of life – is also held by others.

Let’s talk about Europe.

So proud of your lighting. So fast to invoke “never again.” So silent when the bodies are Palestinian.

The European Union is Israel’s largest commercial partner.

He signed an agreement promising that human rights would be a condition for trade. This promise is now a tomb.

His own analysis concluded that Israel violated the agreement. And what did Europe do? Nothing.

To mask its complicity, the EU claimed to have reached a humanitarian agreement with Israel. A supposed advance. But it was just staging.

No help has arrived. No siege was raised.

It was a smoke curtain – a gesture that only aimed at blinding the audience, gaining time while children starved.

As Amnesty International declared: “A cruel and illegal betrayal of the law, consciousness, and Europe itself.”

This will be remembered – not as politics, but as complicity. Not as neutrality, but as a partnership in crime.

And what about Arab regimes?

They are the closest. They speak of fraternity and shared blood, but now they are guards, jailers and executors.

Palestinian children wait at a food distribution point in noseirat, in the center of the Gaza Strip, on June 23, 2025 | AFP

Let us start with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi-the general who became president, sworn in a coup supported by Israel. It rules egypt with tear gas and prisons. But, the most heinous, in Sinai, he built a tampon to block the gaza entrance.

Rafah’s crossing is closed. Humanitarian aid trucks rot in the sun. Doctors have the entrance denied. Children are dying – not for lack of help, but because help is blocked. International activists are arrested, interrogated and deported.

A flash of Palestinian Keffiyeh is a crime.

This is not security. It is servitude.

And then we have Jordan, a kingdom that sells its inheritance with one hand and holds its citizens with the other.

They arrested teachers, students and tribal leaders for shaking flags, setting up tents and organizing humanitarian aid. They say it is to combat the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is really to crush Palestine.

What Sisi does with control posts, Jordan does to the courts.

Solidarity became a crime. Submission, virtue.

This is the dictator’s manual: to obey the West and accommodate Israel.

So isolate your people and do whatever you want.

They are not spectators.

They are partners – in hunger, in the siege, in the massacre.

The naked and raw shame of the world

And during all of that – the slow murder, the pantomime of diplomacy – told us to wait. To trust the negotiations.

But what kind of world makes the feeding of children hungry a matter of debate?

What kind of diplomacy transforms bread into a bargaining chip?

This is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was allowed to do: turn food into a lever, treat the relief of a besieged population as a prize to be exchanged.

It wasn’t just immoral. It was illegal. It was obscene.

Humanitarian access is not a favor to be granted. It is a duty guaranteed by law.

Delaying, discussing, retaining for political gain is turning hunger into a weapon – and a complicit diplomacy of war crimes.

What is happening in Gaza does more than violate the law: destroys it.

It destroys all the principles of humanity, all the treaties that intend to defend it.

The world not only failed Gaza. Abandoned it. And in doing so, he exposed himself.

Gaza is not just an extermination field.

She is a mirror – and in her reflection, we see our absolute and naked shame.

Originally published by Mee on 07/21/2025

Por Soumaya Ghannoushi

Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British-Tunisian writer and Middle Eastern policy specialist.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s responsibility and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.