The Spire

Ian Sykes ’28

Staff Writer

As 14-year-old Ahmed Jazar walks down a dirt road to buy bread for his family Sebastia, Palestine, he dreams about owning a decorating shop. Something more for his family – better than this. There, an Israeli soldier sees his target. “Mongrels,” he mutters. Aiming down his sights, the soldier exhales, smirks, and pulls the trigger.

Ahmed collapses and bleeds out, a bullet in his heart. The soldier raises his rifle in celebration.

This is Palestine. A child starves, a mother dies, and a father cries. Definitionally, a genocide is widespread violence or conduct that is performed with the intent of wiping out a specific group of people. Over the last 2 years, Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians with arms, starved them, and exacerbated disease among them. Currently, over 500,000 Palestinians are starving, according to the UN, as a deliberate war effort. Deaths have totaled anywhere between 64,000, according to official Gaza health ministries, or upwards of 335,500 direct, indirect, and long-term deaths, according to the Lancet Medical Journal, from this war. This is a genocide.

Israel Katz, Israel’s defense minister, said after leveling a building in Gaza that “the gates of Hell are being unlocked in Gaza City.” According to NPR, former Israeli Major General 

Aharon Haliva said, “The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations… it doesn’t matter if they’re children… from time to time, they need a Nakba to feel the cost.” 

“Nakba” means catastrophe in Arabic, and it references an eponymous 1948 event where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians died and were displaced by Israel. As Israel blocks off U.N. aid en masse, blows up food trucks, brutalizes aid workers, and obliterates aid distribution centers, they are making another Nakba.

Not only is Israel perpetrating it, but the US is funding it. Substantially. To date, the United States has given Israel $174 billion (nominal) of assistance (~71% being military assistance) according to the Congressional Research Service. After the October 7th attacks, when Israel was attacked by Hamas, the United States gave Israel even more billions.

Speaking of October 7th, let me specify for possible detractors – the October 7th attacks were a tragedy. Hamas is a terrorist organization. As such, that attack was repugnant, but it gives Israel no right to massacre unarmed Palestinian civilians. I happen to believe that the right approach to counterterrorism is not indiscriminate violence on civilians. Indeed, that attack was an excuse to carry out a genocide under the guise of “counterterrorism.”

I am no expert on geopolitics, but I must ask, why would Israel starve over 500,000 Palestinians? To counter terrorism? No. They want to wipe them out. Starvation is a war crime.

According to a Gallup poll from July, only 32% of Americans support Israel’s actions in Gaza. Even in Israel itself, on August 17, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens lined the streets in Tel Aviv to protest the Gaza war, according to Reuters.

Are the >32,000 women, children, and elderly Israel has ravaged since October 7th all Hamas operatives? Are the starving people who get shot sprinting to a dilapidated aid site also Hamas operatives? Why are cities being flattened, hospitals bombed to smithereens, and children being shot? Why is America funding it?

I understand this article may aggravate some people. If you happen to think that what Israel is doing right now is acceptable, so be it. Just know that when you reach the blessed gates of Heaven yourself one day, God will know what side of human history you were on.

Copy Edited by Ella Woei ’26

Featured image courtesy of The Guardian