Israel Dangled Food in Gaza’s Face – Now They’re Choking on the Fallout

Right, so Israel has discovered a new definition of generosity: let the food in, but only if it’s priced beyond the reach of the starving. Some of Gaza’s markets now resemble almost normality — lined with fruit and flour that exist not to feed people, but to feed propaganda. Tel Aviv gets to boast: “See, there is food, what famine? Such claims are Hamas lies.” All while children walk past bread they’ll never taste, teased in the cruellest way possible as their bellies rumble and they stagger from weakness. It’s the kind of stunt that would be denounced as barbarism if Assad had tried it, or as a crime against humanity if Putin had. But when Israel does it, the headlines get sanded down to “complex access issues.” This isn’t famine hidden from view; it’s famine being flaunted, famine being mocked, a famine dressed up as plenty. So the question arises of all of Israel’s deliberate acts, could this be the cruellest?
Right, so rhere are crimes of war that sear themselves into memory because they strip away every excuse, every mask, every fog of ambiguity. Gaza is living through one of them right now, but the media is paying scant attention to it. Some of the markets are full of food. Shelves stacked with rice and flour, sacks of lentils, tins of tuna, sometimes even fresh fruit arranged in neat little pyramids. Photographs prove it: in Rafah or Deir al-Balah you could, at first glance, believe you were walking through any other bustling Middle Eastern bazaar. But the moment you step closer, the truth shatters the illusion. Families pass those stalls empty-handed. Parents hear their children beg for bread and have to tell them no. Food is visible, but it is unreachable. It is a mirage within arm’s length.
And Israel, the occupying power that controls every crossing and every truck, points to those stalls and says: look, there is food, there is no famine, the world is lying about us.
This is not incompetence. It is not chaos. It is deliberate cruelty. A stunt so depraved it should be studied as the textbook example of cruelty disguised as generosity. Israel has refused to allow sufficient free humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has allowed only commercial imports. Trucks carrying goods to be sold for profit, not distributed to the hungry, knowing few can afford it. And since Gaza’s economy is shattered — no jobs, no salaries, no functioning banks — families cannot pay. The result is a famine performed in plain sight. A famine where markets become theatre, food becomes a prop, and starvation is mocked by the illusion of plenty.
The United Nations’ own reports confirm the mechanics. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs noted that since August only “limited commercial truck entries, mainly dry foods” have been permitted through Zikim crossing. Not aid convoys, not the flour sacks that would feed families for free. Dry goods to stock shelves for sale. The World Food Programme has said bakeries have shut down for lack of flour and fuel. Community kitchens are out of food to cook. It has been reported that prices have spiked by up to 1,400 percent: flour more expensive than meat, vegetables turned into luxury items. Profiteers raising prices beyond imagination, all while aid itself that might get in, ends up being diverted, resold in those same markets at inflated rates.
Every piece fits. OCHA confirms famine has been ongoing in Gaza City since July. The World Food Programme describes an entire population pushed to the brink. Human Rights Watch calls it what it is: “Israel is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” This is not a tragedy of circumstance. This is a war crime.
Yet when you turn to the mainstream press, you get euphemism and that’s if they report it at all. “Rising food prices.” “Humanitarian access issues.” “Complex conditions at crossings.” You get Palestinian voices like Ahmad Abushawish, who wrote in Al Jazeera that “markets are full while we starve.” That is how silence works. If Bashar al-Assad had pulled this trick in Aleppo, it would have been a front-page scandal. If Vladimir Putin had staged this in Mariupol, the word “famine” would have been splashed across every broadsheet in bold. But Israel does it in Gaza, and the story is filed away as commentary if at all.
To see why this matters, you have to feel the psychological violence of it. It is one thing to be deprived of food altogether. It is another to see food all around you and know it is not yours. A child stares at bread within reach. A parent has to explain to that child, that that bread might as well be on another planet. Hunger gnaws, but humiliation wounds deeper. That is the cruelty Israel has perfected. Not just starving people, but forcing them to watch as food sits just metres away. Turning survival into an illusion. Turning famine into mockery.
And this cruelty has a history. In 2012, leaked documents showed Israeli officials calculating the minimum calories needed for Gazans to avoid outright starvation while still being malnourished. The so-called “red lines” policy. Gaza was to be “on a diet.” It was bureaucratised cruelty, reduced to numbers on a page. Then, the method was scarcity. Now, the method is performance. Then, the shelves were empty. Now, they are full but unreachable. The façade has fallen away; it has shattered.
Human Rights Watch says Israel’s actions tick every box in the definition of a war crime. And the law is not vague. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions bans the use of starvation against civilians. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court codifies it as a prosecutable offence. Israel’s blockade, calibrated to allow only commercial goods, is not an accident of war. It is the textbook example of the crime those laws were written to prevent. And yet — how many editors spell that out? How many anchors say it out loud? Tumbleweed.
The failure of coverage is not neutral. It is complicity. Because euphemism does not merely soften the story; it becomes part of the stunt. Israel waves a photo of a market stall, Western media prints “food available but unaffordable,” as if that is it and the lie holds. The façade of plenty remains intact. Only those like Abushawish, writing from the ground, show the curtain being pulled back. His phrase — “markets full while we starve” — punctures the illusion. It is simple, human, unignorable. Which is why it is so dangerous to Israel, and why it is buried as “opinion.”
But while Israel polishes its lies, the regional landscape shifts under its feet. For decades, Israel’s fallback defence has been indispensability. Gulf monarchies needed its covert security guarantees, Washington needed its alliance. That shielded Israel from accountability. But now, Saudi Arabia has signed a mutual defence pact with Pakistan, so Riyadh is no longer turning to Washington or Tel Aviv for its survival. It is turning to Islamabad — a nuclear power, a military heavyweight, a state beyond American veto, I’ve covered this story in another video out tonight.
At the same time, Iran and Saudi Arabia are deepening their coordination. Ali Larijani’s visit to Riyadh was more than optics. It was substance, cementing a thaw that began under Chinese mediation back in 2023. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with his Saudi counterpart Faisal bin Farhan, with the Saudi–Pakistan pact as backdrop. A triangle is forming: Riyadh, Islamabad, Tehran. Once unimaginable, now real. And Israel is not in it.
Why does that matter for Gaza? Because Israel’s stunt — markets full, people starving — is not just about Gaza. It is about narrative control. For decades, Israel relied on the West to parrot its denials. But as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan align, as Iran strengthens its hand, Israel’s propaganda shield cracks. Rivals can now point to Gaza and say: here is Israel’s democracy, here is its morality, starving children in front of piles of food. What the West buries, the region broadcasts. What Western anchors euphemise, Riyadh and Tehran will arguably weaponise. The stunt, meant to prove Israel’s resilience, risks blowing up in its face. The façade of plenty collapses into proof of famine instead.
But this raises a haunting question doesn’t it? If famine with food in sight is not enough to provoke outrage, what is? If children starving to death in front of fruit and vegetables is not enough to command headlines, what would be? And the fact that this question even has to be asked is part of the crime.
History will not record this as a tragic accident. It will not describe it as “rising food prices” or “complex access issues” like our media are. It will record it as a deliberate stunt, a war crime, an act of humiliation masquerading as claims to the contrary. It will remember Gaza’s markets not as places of commerce but as performative cruelty. It will remember Western silence not as oversight but as participation. And it will remember those who spoke — Palestinians like Abushawish — as the ones who told the truth while the world looked away.
The regional context only sharpens the irony. As Israel clings to the lie of stocked markets, it loses its grip on the alliances that once protected it. Saudi Arabia hedges with Pakistan. Iran builds ties with Riyadh. And Israel, for all its propaganda, is still left exposed, just with more people even more disgusted at them. What was meant to be a stunt of control has becomes a spectacle of weakness. The optics it hoped would absolve it instead have condemned it.
So we end where we began. A child stands in Gaza in front of a stall of bread. The bread is within sight, within reach, but not theirs. Around them, the world debates whether famine even exists, whether access is sufficient, whether the numbers add up. But the child does not need numbers. The child knows the truth. The hunger is in their stomach, the humiliation in their heart. That is the crime. That is the stunt. That is the cruelty.
And here is the dangling question, the one the world cannot seem answer: why are Gaza’s markets full while Gaza’s people starve? Until we face the truth of that, until we say it aloud, until we refuse to let silence mask it, we are part of the cruelty too.
If you didn’t catch the decimation of Israel’s normalisation hopes in my other video from tonight with regards to that defence deal between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, do check out my coverage of those events and the kick in the teeth for Netanyahu it is in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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