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.”
