In her Saturday newsletter sent out to Guardian subscribers that has the above heading, editor-in-chief Katherine Viner lays out a powerful indictment of Israel’s horrifying crimes in Gaza and the complicity of the US and other western countries that have allowed this to continue for so long. I am reproducing it in full, along with accompanying photographs. These were some of the photographs coming out that show small children with skeletal bodies as a result of Israel’s deliberate policy of starving the entire population. The first image is evocative of the Madonna and child of Christian iconography.
Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, an 18-month old child in Gaza who faces life-threatening malnutrition. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Mohammed, seven, and Zeina, 10. Their mother says the family has been ‘silencing our hunger with water’. Photograph: Seham Tantesh/The Guardian
I will never forget the photos of children traumatized by war, such as the ones from Vietnam and the US attack on Iraq. As I said in that post from back in 2006:
Each war has its iconic pictures and the ones that affect me most are not the headshots of the corpses of well known figures like Saddam Hussein’s sons (Uday and Qusay) and al-Zarqawi that are splashed in large color photographs across the front pages of newspapers, as if they were trophies. What moves me are the pictures of children affected by war. The picture that I will always remember about Vietnam is the one that shows a crying young child running away with others from the scene of a bombing, her clothes and skin burned from the napalm dropped on her village, smoke from its ruins billowing in the background.
For Iraq, the picture that haunts me is the one that shows a blood-spattered terrified Iraqi child just after US soldiers had killed her parents as they were traveling in their car near a checkpoint. I have seen some truly grisly and stomach churning pictures of the casualties of the car bombings and shootings and bombings of the Iraq war, of children and old people, men and women, their dead and mutilated bodies captured in indelible images that have never been seen by most people. But there is something about this picture of a grief stricken little crying child, cowering under the gun of a heavily armed soldier, her upturned supplicating hands stained with the blood of her parents, that fills me with an almost unbearable sadness.
I will never forget these pictures. They are seared in my memory as symbols of the atrocity of war. Each time I see or remember them I feel sick at the level of brutality to which we have sunk.
Those photos and these two from Gaza will haunt me to my grave. It is things such as this that make me wish that there was a hell since the people who can do such things deserve nothing less.
Here is Viner’s editorial.
Throughout July, the horrifying news out of Gaza has been constant, with Israel killing, according to an analysis of UN data, one person every 12 minutes and also, according to the UN, more than 1,000 Palestinians dying while trying to get food.
The scale of mass starvation in Gaza is overwhelming. If one image captured the story it was perhaps the photograph taken by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini of 18-month-old baby Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq (above), which featured prominently on our website and the front of Thursday’s edition of our newspaper.
Emma Graham-Harrison, our chief Middle East correspondent, has been working with Palestinian reporter Malak A Tantesh and photographer Seham Tantesh, who are in Gaza, to try to convey the scale of this human-made catastrophe. Emma and Malak spoke to staff at a children’s hospital where beds are crowded with skeletal children and the doctors too are barely able to feed themselves. It is a harrowing read. Emma also wrote about the devastating long-term impact that mass hunger has on a people: both the permanent damage it inflicts on bodies and minds, and the destabilising effect on the social order, on society itself.
The choice for many in Gaza is to either go without food, or seek it out and risk being killed via the chaotic and militarised aid distribution centres, run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, where hundreds of people have been killed since May. This week our visuals team explained in forensic detail why these aid centres are proving both deadly and inadequate for the scale of the disaster. British doctor Nick Maynard, a volunteer surgeon at Nasser hospital, wrote in a devastating column for our opinion section: “What is being done to Palestinians in Gaza is barbaric and entirely preventable. I cannot believe we have come to a point where the world is watching as the people of Gaza are forced to endure starvation and gunfire, all while food and medical aid sit across the border just miles away from them.”
Yesterday the UK, France and Germany called for an immediate end to the “humanitarian catastrophe” and demanded Israel lifts restrictions on aid. It followed a tough statement by 28 countries attacking Israel for depriving Palestinians of “human dignity” on Monday. But even, as the global outcry at the killing of starving civilians grows, pressure is building on Israel’s traditional allies to do more. Our UK political editor Pippa Crerar revealed that senior members of the cabinet are pressuring Keir Starmer to recognise Palestinian statehood (as France announced it would on Thursday), while our Politics Weekly UK podcast asked when Britain’s actions would match its political condemnations of Israel.
On Wednesday we published a powerful editorial on this point: until concrete action is taken, western allies such as the UK will remain complicit with these horrifying crimes: “Faced with the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, other states must together produce a systematic, comprehensive and concrete response. If not now, when? What more would it take to convince them? This is first and foremost a catastrophe for Palestinians. But if states continue to allow international humanitarian law to be shredded, the repercussions will be felt by many more around the world in years to come. History will not ask whether these governments did anything to stop genocide by an ally, but whether they did all they could.”
It should be read, and the photographs seen, by everyone.
I cannot express how much I despise the world leaders who let this happen
There are so many things going on that are all hateful, it’s really hard to process it all. The US and Israel, between them and Russia, have conclusively hammered the nails into the coffin of “international order” So much for the League of Nations, which was created with a toxic trapdoor of preferred vetoes. I can’t tell which fills me with more hate, the US congressional “representatives” that keep sending weapons to Israel, or the ones who are cheerfully ignoring US laws that were put in place to stop the US from arming Israel, or .. aigh, arg, it’s an endless pit of worse and worse the farther you go. It won’t happen, and it literally doesn’t matter, but in my opinion the UN should disband, then re-form immediately in a civilized country, with a charter that has no vetoes in it.
But it’s like the damnable Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the US and all the nuclear powers are violating themselves, constantly -- provision one says that they will all work diligently toward disarmament. Instead, it has become the “nuclear club”‘s club to use against non-signatories. By the way, North Korea actually correctly followed all of its treaty obligations when it built its nukes, though you’ll never catch the US saying anything except that it thinks it has the right to attack anyone, at any time.
Our militarism is going to kill humanity. One of the elephants in the room is that war and military equipment have a godzilla-like carbon footprint. Well-meaning people save their grocery store plastic bags, and the government blows through the carbon budget of a medium-sized country just flying B-52s around over sporting events. A number of the big “tipping points” have been blown through and the anoxic ocean zones keep growing, carbon emissions keep rising, the ice keeps melting, the global ocean currents are collapsing and -- probably the one that scares me the most -- the corn crop in Ohio is sterile because it overheated. The US Government has stuck to its insane declared strategy, which is “we’re going to stop worrying about emissions.” +4 was what I was expecting but it’s looking like +6 could be in the cards. As I write this, the heat index in Dubai is 140. A friend of mine in Wuhan says the effective heat is 104 and the humidity is almost 100%. Old people are dying and I am becoming old.
Literally, everything is getting worse and shows no sign of reversing in the next decade.
@birgerjohansson@#1:
We keep letting the very worst examples of humanity lead us.
Against Israel’s illegal blockade, American team tried to bring in baby formula and diapers but were captured by Israel.
The volunteers on board could not sit back while Gazans starve, so they set out to bring a tiny amount of needed supplies to Gaza. They knew that Israel would likely try to stop passage, even with verification that supplies are humanitarian
Veterans for Peace says:
It’s been very instructive to watch various bits of the media reluctantly inching towards a reasonable position over the last few weeks… It now looks like you can get away with machine-gunning children, and you can get away with starving children, but machine-gunning starving children may still be a step too far. Good to know where the boundaries are!
Oh, but Bibi was in the news, insisting there was no starving going on in Gaza. “I see NUFFINK!” He’s just like Trump in his ability to not see the atrocities he’s committing.
@Marcus:
Of course, the five permanent members of the U.S. Security Council with vetoes are the nations which:
-- refused to join the U.N. if there was any way it could be used against them, and
-- were powerful enough that a U.N. without them would have no useful power at all.
I agree with you that the vetoes are a problem which hamstrings the U.N…. the problem, of course, is how to actually convince the 500 pound gorillas in the room to sign on to an organization without them. Note how the U.S. has refused to sign on to the International Criminal Court, after all…