'Calculated extermination': Human Rights advocates in US decry Israel's Gaza blockade

On the heels of US President Donald Trump's tour of the Gulf for luxury business deals, a group of Palestinian human rights advocates this week laid bare the horrific humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip caused by Israel.

As Palestinians in Gaza wait for aid to cross the border, many risk starvation amid fears of what a renewed Israeli takeover of the besieged enclave will mean. The United Nations recently warned that if sufficient aid doesn't arrive soon, 14,000 babies could die.

On Tuesday, a panel shared with reporters an update with an urgent appeal for humanitarian relief, suggesting a strategy by Israel to ethnically cleanse the enclave through the withholding of food aid.

"Israel's starvation of Gaza has reached a crisis point, as Israel continues a blockade of Gaza, only allowing five trucks of aid in since March, of which two trucks were filled with burial shrouds, and just this morning the United Nations humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, warned that thousands of children could die within days. If adequate humanitarian aid does not enter Gaza," Randa Wahbe, Rethink Media's director of rights and inclusion, told reporters at the beginning of a panel discussion on the Gaza Strip.

US President Donald Trump had recently returned from a trip to the Gulf, in which he made a series of business deals, skipping Israel and the Palestinian territories, though briefly mentioning vague plans for a post-war Gaza in which the US would take control of the enclave. He also acknowledged the rising level of starvation in Gaza as he concluded his tour, though didn't give specifics about how he would address it.

"I have concepts for Gaza that I think are very good, make it a freedom zone, let the United States get involved and make it just a freedom zone," Agence France-Presse reported Trump as saying during his stay in the United Arab Emirates, as he seemed to hint at a US-back beachfront real estate development that he has been touting for over a year. This would take the 40-kilometre remainder of the Palestinian's Mediterranean coastline.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel is continuing its latest military assault that began on Saturday called Operation Gideon’s Chariot, which has already killed more than 600 Palestinians, the latest in a series of military assaults on the densely populated area since October 2023, part of a broader strategy that goes back to 1948.

"This is not because of a natural disaster, a hurricane, or an earthquake, or some kind of prolonged drought that's led to famine. This has been a man-made catastrophe, that is the product of calculated policy that is, decades in the making," Yousef Munayyer, Washington-based political analyst told reporters.

"The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and really the concentration of a huge swath of the Palestinian population into what became known as the Gaza Strip. 80 percent of the people who are in the Gaza Strip are not originally from that area, but from surrounding areas. So, from the very outset of the creation of this space, it has been in a state of crisis, and the core issues underlying this crisis," he said.

He pointed to various points in the last eight decades in which the enclave has experienced military assaults and lack of access to food denied by the Israeli military, what he sees as a tactic for ethnic cleansing.

Providing details of the present-day situation in Gaza, Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) USA, pointed to the denial of food and medical supplies to two million Palestinians in Gaza.

"For eleven weeks Israel has denied food and medical supplies, as we know, to over two million Palestinians in the beleaguered Gaza Strip," she said.

"This weaponisation of starvation follows 19 months of brutal military assault, mass displacement, the systematic destruction of Gaza's health care system, demolition of mosques cultural landmarks, schools," she continued, adding that she sees these tactics as a way to push Gazans further into the south.

She went on to say that due to Israel's withholding of food and medicine, much of which is sitting in warehouses, around 20 percent of the population risks starvation. Moreover, she noted that a US military plan called "the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" lacks basic Palestinian involvement and is dependent on Israeli coordination.

Hani Madhoun, head of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, has an even grimmer assessment of the lack of food access, based his time on the ground observing those he serves, estimating that half a million Gazans are in immediate danger of starvation.

"They're coming to the kitchen, and then we have to send them to the medical point to connect them with IV. So this is no longer about food," said Madhoun.

Regardless of the level of hunger and lack of access to food, one thing the panellists agree on is that this is an intentional withholding of people's lifelines in order to displace them from their homes, or a blockade for the purpose of ethnic cleansing.

"It's an extermination policy," said Huwaida Arraf, a founding member of the International Solidarity Movement.

"It was a form of collective punishment, and still nothing done by the international community," she said, pointing to western countries that give unconditional support to Israel’s policies, even in the most dire times for Palestinians.

"It is these years and decades of impunity that have led us to where we are today, where Israel can carry out this extermination campaign. It's not even, you know, quiet about it and feel like it can get away with it, because certainly it has been taught to believe that it can," she emphasised.