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Nothing has entered Gaza for more than 50 days. Charity kitchens are warning they are only days away from shuttering services. Two million people on the brink. We are currently witnessing Israel’s solution to the Gaza question—an unmistakable humanitarian crisis engineered by the Israeli government to remove from its borders an entire people it has deemed the equivalent of locusts.
"No one cares about us," stated an emaciated man in the ruins of Gaza this week. Women and children with pots outstretched beg for crumbs. Families survive on one meal a day. Trash, sewage, and disease overwhelm the 25-mile long Gaza strip. “The scene we come across every morning, hundreds of people queue for long hours, waiting with empty pots and pans, clamoring to get food for their families back in tents or displacement sites,” reported Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud on Tuesday. “Many of them are scouring piles of garbage to get trash to start fires in order to cook or to keep family members warm during the nighttime.”
“Utter desperation” read the headlines out of Gaza this week. “Civilians are being attacked in incessant military violence,” reported Gavin Kelleher with the Norwegian Refugee Council. “People are selling their belongings, they're selling their clothes to get access to cash to get food. People are trying to sell diapers for a bag of lentils. Begging is overwhelming at this point.” Nothing is getting through. One of the great famines of the 21st century is happening before our eyes in real time. The bombings continue unabated. Since March, nearly 600 children have been killed in the Gaza region. Another 1,600 wounded have been sent to hospitals where medical supplies are running thin with no relief on the way.
On Tuesday, at least 10 human beings were wiped from this earth in a center housing displaced families. On Wednesday, Israeli airstrikes destroyed a school and hospital in Gaza claiming the lives of 39 people. “Are these terrorists?” screamed a distraught man standing over a dead body in the aftermath. “Are these the ones threatening you, Netanyahu? Are these the ones shooting rockets?” In response to the killings, the Israeli military argues it is targeting “militants.”
Israel’s own allies in Europe are horrified by the conditions. In a joint statement released Wednesday, leaders in France, Germany, and Britain urged the Israeli government to lift its nearly two-month long blockade that has created “intolerable” conditions on the ground. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has been particularly outspoken in recent weeks, telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the suffering “must end.” The international outpouring of condemnation has done little to sway Israeli politicians, who seem intent on rooting out the more than two million people who call the Gaza strip home.
President Donald Trump, who is arguably in the strongest position to affect change in the region, has offered essentially no support to the Palestinian people. In March, Trump posted an AI-generated video of a revamped Gaza that featured gold statues in his image. The video’s creator called the edit a “political satire” and was as surprised as many Israeli critics on the right when Trump enthusiastically shared the edit. In April, Trump called for a U.S.-led “Peace Force” to establish a “Freedom Zone” in the Strip. For a man who campaigned on ending forever wars, especially in the Middle East, the comments rang eerily reminiscent of the “Freedom Fries” era that came to define the GOP of old that Trump has allegedly toppled.
In April, Trump rolled out the red carpet in DC for Netanyahu, a man who faces an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity relating to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. There are many countries where Netanyahu is no longer permitted entry, but when he showed up on America’s eastern shore, Trump did everything in his power to make Israel’s hardman feel right at home in Washington DC.
Perhaps the most consequential thing Trump and his administration has done to permit the blockade and continued suffering in Gaza is the tactics employed in its escalating war with university officials stateside. Trump has single-handedly squashed the pro-Palestinian protest movement that was whipped into fervor during the final year of President Biden’s administration. On Thursday, Trump called Harvard an “anti-semitic, Far Left institution” that allows foreign students “accepted from all over the World” to “spew fake ANGER AND HATE.” Trump noted that “other institutions” have also engaged in allowing the spread of what he deems to be impermissible speech on campuses through the United States.
With threats of deportation for foreign students who pen op-eds against the genocide and loose language from Trump about sending “homegrown criminals” to terror prisons in El Salvador, the president has successfully struck fear into the hearts of students, foreign and domestic, who dare speak ill of the Israeli government and its ongoing crimes against humanity. The campus, long known as a protest vehicle and the spark for political sea change in the United States dating back to the days of Kent State, has been essentially castrated by an administration that rose to power, in part, on the promise to overturn the censorious attitudes of college administrators who signaled out conservative views and students. In its wake, the Trump administration has created an equally untenable position in the other direction.
As Trump ramps up his rhetoric against “antisemitism” on college campuses, new Gallup polling finds that support for Israel has cratered. A majority of Americans now hold negative views of Israel, with support for the nation falling to a 25-year low. In the age of widespread connectivity, many simply cannot look away at the horror and destruction taking place without pause in the Gaza Strip.
Relief for the people of Gaza is nowhere in sight. As the economic chaos created by Trump’s tariff plan dominates news headlines across the West, Gaza is conveniently out of sight and out of mind for Israel as it continues its campaign of horror. As the world squabbles about supply chains and semiconductors, the people of Gaza enter a new phase of death and destruction.
As the days roll on and the death toll piles up, how will future generations remember the role we played in this disaster? Will they view us, and Trump, as peacemakers and not the ones that looked away? It is not our responsibility or in our interest to save the world, true, but it’s also naive to believe that we do not play a sizable role in permitting Israel’s continued bombardment and starvation of the Palestinian people. Something must change and quickly or the blood of innocents will forever be stapled to the recorded rule of Trump and the MAGA right.