Some months ago, I pointed out the similarities between the techniques the Israelis were using in Gaza and those the Germans used in the Warsaw Ghetto, using Marek Edelman’s first-hand account The Ghetto Fights as a source. The scale of Israeli barbarism against the civilian population has gone on to surpass what most people could have imagined. 

Oxfam is reporting that people in northern Gaza are now surviving on an average of 245 calories a day, 12% of a person’s daily requirement. People living in the Warsaw Ghetto were given ration cards entitling them to 300 calories a day. Heroic doctors in the Ghetto studied the effects of hunger on adults and children. They noted that in children “the earliest signs of starvation were apathy, slow movement, and no interest in play. They were sad and became quarrelsome, and intellectual development stopped.” Overlay that with eighteen months of constant trauma, death, homelessness and mutilation and the long term consequences on those that somehow survive an attempt to wipe out the population of Gaza will defy comprehension.  

Edelman described something similar: “The times when people were given three loaves of bread are long gone. Sweating, feverish children lie helplessly in their mothers’ arms. People seem to shrink, becoming smaller, greyer”.  

The World Food Programme says that “Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of severe hunger and malnutrition, with borders closed to aid since 2 March”.  

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)  reported that 92% of children aged six months to two years, along with their mothers, are not receiving the minimum required nutrition, and that 65% of Gaza’s population lacks access to clean drinking water. 

An account cited in Alexandra  Richie’s books Warsaw 1944 says: “Hunger is written all over their miserable grey faces…The lamentable state of the children cries out for help. In these smelly damp holes around 25 000 live in the open air. The lack of water and medical care spreads illness and death” (p.561). Exactly like Gaza.  

“The attacking and bombing of the town which continues with no retaliation increases the awareness that the enemy is trying to destroy the whole town… the exhaustion of food for permanent residents, the high death rate amongst infants.” Exactly like Gaza.  

The Israeli government has determined that Palestinians are superfluous people, unwanted and unneeded in their colonial expansionist state. History is repeating itself using the traditional methods of colonisers.  What is new this time is that American imperialism is fully behind the project and it’s unconditionally supported by the British Labour government and the Tory Party