“You do whatever you want,” President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu, it seems, took Mr. Trump at his word.
Israel has clamped Gaza back under near-total siege, barring desperately needed humanitarian aid and other goods from entering the hungry and bomb-decimated enclave. Food, medicine, tents, fuel — for the past week and a half, supplies have not been permitted into Gaza, where some two million Palestinians are trying to survive in the wreckage. And Mr. Netanyahu keeps tightening the screws: On Sunday, Israel cut off the last trickle of electricity into Gaza, forcing a key desalination plant that provides drinking water to slow operations. With hunger setting in, people reduced to living in tents or in the precarious shelter of half-crushed buildings, and clean water and fuel in vanishing supply, it feels too generous to say that Gaza is on the brink of collapse; in many respects, Gaza has already collapsed.
Israeli officials are essentially starving Gaza as a negotiation tactic. Rather than proceed on the agreed-upon schedule to the second phase of the cease-fire, Mr. Netanyahu is now demanding a seven-week extension of the preliminary stage.
This makes sense, of course, for Mr. Netanyahu — the first stage is the simplest, allowing for more hostages to be released without grappling with the thornier (and for Mr. Netanyahu, politically radioactive) elements contained in the second phase, including withdrawing troops from Gaza and making concrete plans to end the war. But so far, Hamas has refused to go along, pointing out that Israel is unilaterally veering away from its obligations under the agreement.
And so, consistent with the cruel corporeality of this conflict, Israel has locked the people of Gaza back into an impregnable box, with little access to food or supplies, and warned that if Hamas doesn’t quickly agree to release more hostages, all-out war could resume.
“The Gaza gates will be locked, and the gates of hell will open” if Hamas doesn’t release more hostages, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, said last week.
Mr. Trump appears to be on board with this disgraceful tactic. As the cease-fire hangs on the edge of failure and negotiations grind along, the exhausted people of Gaza endure a macabre and dehumanizing test of wills.
“Any amount of aid that is prevented from Gaza is a death sentence,” said Majed Jaber, an emergency room doctor who spoke with me from Gaza. His home smashed by bombs, Dr. Jaber sleeps in a drafty tent that floods in the winter rains. Before the cease-fire, he said, food had become so scarce that he’d lost 40 pounds, even as he witnessed some of his patients die of complications from malnutrition.
“I personally was starving,” he said. “Do I believe that may happen again? I do.”
Shortly after speaking with Dr. Jaber, I read an Israeli news story reporting that the recently freed hostages suffered extreme weight loss, dental problems and health issues from drinking dirty water. It was identical to what I’d been hearing from Palestinians in Gaza. Which is not surprising, but highlights the madness of Israel’s approach: to starve Gaza in order to force Hamas to release the hostages is, of course, to starve the hostages, too.
Lately it feels as if the human beings in Gaza are increasingly lost from our understanding. The physicality of their plight fades into the background, then creeps back. Hamas will cling to these 59 human beings it dragged from their home as bargaining chips, dead or alive — its only leverage. And the people of Gaza have themselves been caught for decades in that claustrophobic run of land.
It may be futile to point this out during a war so thick with atrocities, but the deliberate starvation of civilians is a war crime, and so, too, is the taking of civilian hostages. Israeli leaders surely know these laws. It was, after all, the near-total blockade of Gaza just after the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, that went into evidence at The Hague, helping cement the International Criminal Court’s outstanding arrest warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
When warnings of famine first started to trickle out of Gaza, Israeli officials furiously denied the assessments of aid organizations, and even some U.S. politicians, that Israel was blocking aid, insisting the hunger in Gaza was the United Nations’ fault, Hamas’s fault, and so on. Under Mr. Trump, it seems, protestations of innocence are no longer required. Since Oct. 7, emboldened Israeli soldiers and settlers are also punishing Palestinians in the West Bank, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands while openly discussing annexation. Meanwhile, with Mr. Trump’s evangelical backers pushing for Israel to seize the entire West Bank, the current administration has lifted sanctions against extremist settlers.
I asked the Gazan author Yousri Alghoul whether the people around him were afraid of a return to bombardment. His answer was crushing — grieving and preoccupied with trying to secure basic daily necessities, he said, people hardly have any “interaction with the situation” of geopolitics and negotiations.
“They do not care whether the war is coming again or not, because they feel that they lost everything,” he said. “They lost their houses, they lost their families, children, women, wives, husbands. So people are saying, ‘OK, whatever.’ If it comes back, if it kills us.”
“We’re not living a suitable life,” he added. “It’s like a hell.”
I can’t shake the disconcerting sense that Gaza is already disappearing. The buildings knocked down, the dead scattered in the wreckage, and every time another Gaza journalist is killed, it closes another eye that we used to look through.
And suddenly here comes Mr. Trump with his plan to “own” Gaza, with beach resorts built on boneyards, ethnically cleansing his way to a paradise — for whom?
“The people of the world,” Mr. Trump said.
But not, it seems, for the people of Gaza.
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