World of Politics with Harry McGee

For some weeks now, we have seen disturbing images of malnourished skeletal infants, with visible ribs and skin barely covering their skulls. After three months of a cruel and heartless blockade of Gaza which left its population of two million people starving, homeless, desperate and humiliated, it is clear that the Israeli government is indifferent to the lives of those who live there.

Those they won’t kill, they want to drive them out, to exile them to the arid deserts of Jordan and Egypt, in an act of ethnic cleansing.

More than 53,000 Gazans have been killed since the outbreak of the war, tens of thousands of them children. Schools, hospitals, homes, and infrastructure have been deliberately attacked. Benyamin Netanyahu and his government say they want to destroy Hamas but it is hard to come to any other conclusion that they equate Hamas with every man, woman and child who lives in Gaza. All are fair game. Portrayed as somehow lesser human beings, with less right to existence.

Even in the West Bank, Israeli aggression has grown apace as the right-wing government pushes ahead with more illegal settlements. More than 900 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2003, compared to about 30 Israeli citizens.

The events of October 7 were an act of terror and indefensible. But the response of Israel has become a far more grotesque act of terror, and wholly indefensible. This is genocide. This is ethnic cleansing. It is utterly, utterly devastating.

And yet, depressingly, so many western countries — including leading members of the European Union like Germany — have unquestionably backed Israel and turned a blind eye to its horrors.

Only now in the past few days — three months into the blockade and partly in response to a chorus of international criticism — the Israelis have set up its own aid distribution system, bypassing the United Nations. But that too is deeply questionable.

An Israeli and American-backed agency, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has set up four distribution ‘hubs’, three of them in Southern Gaza. This was viewed as deliberate, as the IDF’s war mission is to push the population to the south of the strip.

The four hubs contrasted with hundreds in operation when the UN and aid agencies were allowed into Gaza before March 2. Even before it began operations it was mired in controversy. Its director quit the week before, citing compromise. And then the large American firm, Boston Consulting Group, which seemed to have designed its logistics plan, also walked away.

Pictured: Tens of thousands of children have been killed since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.