Analysis
Impunity in Gaza: Ethnic cleansing and bread warfare
The UN is stressing that 3,000 trucks, loaded not only with food but also with medicines, are stuck in Jordan and Egypt waiting for permission to enter while their goods are about to expire.
It is happening now in Gaza. In the giant firing range that is tearing apart the lives of women and men – who can even count the dead anymore? – where the Israeli army is intensifying its air strikes and accelerating its re-occupation of the Strip, adding dozens of civilian victims every day, the stage has been set for the ultimate act of domination and humiliation: aid turned into a weapon of blackmail, privatised and militarised after UN agencies have been excluded and bombed, and distributed inside prison-camp areas, to bring the ethnic cleansing to completion.
One wouldn’t do this to a dog, but that is their fate: children who barely managed to survive cold and disease are now starting to die of hunger by the dozens, while those left alive watch, between rows of white burial shrouds, the daily slaughter that will stay with them forever.
Even the director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – the new US-backed body set up to deliver aid in the Strip – resigned on Monday, May 26, with immediate effect, saying the organisation was unable to adhere “to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”
Thousands upon thousands of Palestinians – children, women, the elderly, unarmed civilians – had a much more vivid grasp of the same point. On Tuesday, May 27, they stormed, in sheer desperation, the GHF aid complex in the Rafah area of southern Gaza, while the American contractors fled. The site was wrecked and its fence torn down, while an Israeli combat helicopter fired into the air to disperse the crowd.
West of Rafah, at the only other open hub – previously there were 400 UN-linked NGO sites, while the Israeli-American plan now allows just four – in the Morag area between Khan Yunis and Rafah, many managed to pick up packages containing pasta, flour, tahini, rice, tomato sauce, fava beans, tea, biscuits and other staples. Israeli sources rushed to claim that some of the displaced people – refugees in their own land – had shouted “Thank you, America.” But the center only stayed open until 19:00, with the parcels only enough for 2,500 people, leaving thousands more hungry as they crowded outside. “Thank you, America,” indeed.
At the same time, according to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the 800th plane loaded with U.S. military aid landed in Israel since the start of the war in Gaza: in total, since October 7, 2023, more than 90,000 tons of weapons and military equipment have arrived from the U.S., including “armored vehicles, munitions, personal protection gear and medical equipment,” to ensure that the IDF can continue its operations, both “for achieving wartime objectives and enhancing force readiness.” All for massacre and bloodshed, followed by the handouts.
The UN is accusing the private organization charged with the Gaza aid distribution scheme of being “a distraction from what is actually needed, such as the opening of crossing points,” and is refusing to cooperate with the blackmail it represents – a stance shared by most humanitarian groups. The UN is stressing that 3,000 trucks, loaded not only with food but also with medicines, are stuck in Jordan and Egypt waiting for permission to enter while their goods are about to expire.
How long can this offence against the whole world last – an offence that, whatever happens, will not go unpunished in humanity’s conscience? Meanwhile, those who have kept a complicit silence, including much of the mainstream media, are only discovering after 20 months that the criminal annihilation of an entire people has been happening and are blabbering on, under the weight of their own shame.
But Gaza, although hungry, is not silent: it keeps sending out messages of despair, appeals for help and cries of revolt to whoever will listen.
Countless photojournalists following in the footsteps of Salgado, risking their lives – 216 reporters have been killed by Israeli bombing in what amount to executions pure and simple – have sent back images that will be forever with us.
These are the snapshots of crowds of human beings stretching out their hands, like the tips of climbing leaves intertwined on a single tree trunk, towards the bread that is kept away from them, and is now being privatized and weaponized – just as much as the air raids, if not more so – to herd millions of Palestinians into concentration camps, under military control, where the biometric selection will begin to determine who has the right to sate their hunger and who doesn’t.
They are reaching out for bread, which Predrag Matvejevic called “precious even in its crumbs and scraps, which should not be thrown away but kissed,” because “bread is the foundation and measure of Mediterranean civilization.” The more those hands reach out, anxious and desperate, the more obvious the crime becomes. It is a picture of the world’s indifference, and it will be hard to wash off the pollution of that crime from these days – and from memory.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/loffesa-del-pane-e-del-sangue on 2025-05-28