Three medical doctors who have worked in Gaza, Mads Gilbert, Dr. James Smith, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, charged in an op-ed in Middle East Eye that Israel is starving Gaza to death, and still the world does nothing. “Starvation is an act of either intentional violence or indifferent neglect, both of which are made possible by our collective inaction,” they wrote. “Nowhere is this more evident than in Gaza, where Israel’s occupation, blockade and now-total siege were designed to exert full control over the Palestinian population, deliberately depriving them of the most basic means to sustain life.”
“So horrific is this particular form of violence that it is distinguished as a specific war crime in the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” they wrote further. “In addition, UN Resolution 2417 condemns both the ‘starvation of civilians as a method of warfare’ and the practice of ‘depriving civilians of objects indispensable to their survival.’”
And yet nothing has been done to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “As physicians who have worked in Gaza during Israel’s occupation, blockade, repeated military assaults, and now genocide, we hold complicit every state that continues to actively and passively support Israel,” the three doctors write. “The Israeli regime has resolutely exposed the ‘logic of elimination’ inherent to its settler-colonial ambitions. Only immediate and concerted action will protect the Palestinian people from this latest stage in Israel’s campaign of genocidal eradication.”