“Feeding the Beast: Gaza, Hunger, and the Lie That Eats the World”

Israel is blamed for not doing what no military in history has ever done—while Hamas starves its own and films the funeral.

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We now live in an era where moral outrage erupts with all the enthusiasm of a drunk man at an open mike night - a man whose mother told him he was funny one too many times.

Gaza, in 2025, is the current centre stage for a performance in which pixelated pain substitutes for principle, and grief is mimed rather than felt. In this grotesque theatre, famine isn’t simply suffered; it’s curated for global optics.

Let’s start with the accusation: Israel is deliberately starving Gaza. It’s a powerful claim, and not without factual anchors. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reported in May 2025 that 500,000 Gazans face catastrophic hunger. Malnourished children appear in newswire images. UNICEF, the WHO, and the Palestinian Ministry of Health cite dozens of hunger-related child deaths since March. These reports cannot—and should not—be dismissed.

But that’s not the end of the story. Hamas has a long tradition of faking images, inflating numbers, and converting carnage into currency. Social media is a weapon of war, and the modern audience, terminally distracted and morally caffeinated, rarely checks the provenance of a pixel.

Misleading images circulate like gospel, and AI now grants martyrdom to the imaginary. Hamas’ real battlefront is public relations. While their first love is always the image of a dead Jew, they also love to take a dead teen with a Kalishnikov, remove the gun, slap a media vest on him, and bring in the photographers.

Few dispute that people are starving. The real question is: *why?* Is this an intentional Israeli policy of extermination, or the deformed by-product of urban warfare where Hamas, an apocalyptic, theocratic militia, treats civilian suffering not as collateral damage, but as its oxygen mask?

Israel’s ministers have been blunt, if not cruel. Finance Minister Smotrich said the goal was to permit only the “absolute minimum” of aid. Netanyahu admitted humanitarian deliveries are allowed primarily to appease allies, not out of moral obligation. These are not the statements of saints. But nor are they declarations of genocide—they are the language of war: arithmetic, not poetry.

And one must ask: if your governing body, an ununiformed army, alongside a cheering crowd of 500-1000 armed men and grinning civilians, commits a cross-border massacre—slaughtering 1,200, dragging bloodied hostages through streets to chants and ululations—should you expect your neighbours to stock your fridges the next morning?

Let us not forget the gleeful grotesquerie of October 7. Teenagers were paraded like trophies; old women, hostages, were manhandled to cheering mobs. These were not bystanders in grief—they were jackals in ecstasy. And yet months later, these same crowds demand global empathy while their leaders refuse even the most basic terms for a ceasefire.

Israel’s restraint, imperfect though it is, begins to look almost saintly when judged against the history of war.

Leningrad. One million dead from starvation. The Wehrmacht cut off all supplies, made no provisions for food, and shelled civilians relentlessly. No UN envoy was dispatched demanding that Hitler increase the caloric allowance.. Not sure Das Fuhrer would have been enthused.

Sarajevo. The Serbs laid siege for nearly four years. UN food convoys were routinely shot at. No moral tribunal suggested the besiegers were obligated to nourish their targets.

Biafra. Nigeria blockaded its seceding population. Two million starved. The world wrung its hands, but no one accused the Nigerian state of intentional genocide-by-hunger.

Even in the brutal 20th century, feeding your enemy during war was not seen as a right. And yet here, Israel—besieged, attacked, demonised—is told to provide hummus and lentils to those who would burn it to the ground. The fact is that in any war, food logistics will never take precedence over military objectives.

The Rafah crossing is often mentioned but rarely explained. Egypt, despite its brotherly proclamations, has kept its end of the gate bolted. Why? Because Cairo fears a flood of refugees destabilising its Sinai region. Hamas, meanwhile, uses the crossing as a means of leverage and for public relations. Result? Warehouses of food rot in the sun while NGOs compose urgent tweets.

On May 28, a UN warehouse was looted, with fatal results. In November, 100 trucks were seized. Israeli reports accuse Hamas of hijacking and reselling aid on the black market. Aid labelled *"Not for Resale"* is openly sold in Gaza’s street markets. This is not organised hunger. This is organised crime.