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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Trump, breaking with Netanyahu, acknowledges ‘real starvation’ in Gaza. Reddit discussion.

This makes him the first right winger I've seen say anything about starvation after something happened recently that made lots of places start talking about it, maybe the move to GHF food distribution? I can't really trust the UN when they talk about it, since they may have been still pissed that Israel cut UNRWA out, plus I heard it was only two dedicated Gaza writers putting out statements of that kind. I can't really trust leftists when they post about it, because they fail to show me their homework and seem to argue a very motivated stance. But Trump talking about it... I don't know about that either. He has spoken off the cuff before. But it brings me to ask: how bad is it? What footage did he see and is it reflected in the data?

Supposing that there is starvation: is that Israel's intention? What is Israel's strategy going forward? I thought that making camps to move civilians into was a good idea, and then once everyone's out, painstakingly clear the whole place, but I think that the international community wouldn't accept that because it's technically ethnic cleansing. There isn't actually anything the international community would be satisfied by except for total ceasefire and return to October 6th. But I don't actually know what the intention is, is the intention to draw Hamas out of hiding to get to the food somehow? I have a hard time discerning what is true about the war and what isn't.

  1. No nation at war has ever been required to feed the opposing army's solders (obviously if taken POW, not the central case) or allow the opposing army's soldiers to be supplied with food by a third party
  2. The enemy army controls the area in which the populace lives
  3. The enemy army will seize the lion's share of food aid for their own soldiers, even if requires shooting their own people to get it

That's pretty much it. You can spend hours looking up historical practice around sieges, I don't know what else you expect to find.

No nation at war has ever been required to feed the opposing army's solders (obviously if taken POW, not the central case) or allow the opposing army's soldiers to be supplied with food by a third party

Doesn't Israel claim sovereignity over the area? This isn't "they won't feed foreigners", this is "people are starving within their claimed jurisdiction" which I think plenty of countries have been blamed for in the past. A pretty significant chunk of Mao and Stalin deaths were starvation in their own territory after all.

Doesn't Israel claim sovereignity over the area?

No, they do not.

I don't think they recognize any state's claim to the territory, do they? I guess that's not completely unprecedented, but I think in practice it is for populated territory.

I believe Israel recognizes the Palestinian Authority's claim, but they don't recognize the PA as a state.

Even with that, the PA doesn't really control Gaza anyway.

Yes, but recognizing one entity's claim to a territory that another entity controls isn't unprecedented at all.

Amazingly enough, what is permissible conduct in wartime has varied greatly based on tech levels. "So after we won, we killed all the males and forced the women into marriages with us" was SOP a few thousand years ago, yet today it would be considered a war crime. For millennia, the sacking of cities involved the looting, murder and rape of civilians for the crime of living in a city which had not surrendered.

Before railroads were a thing, food logistics were often a big operational factor. The only way to move a large army to the land without them starving was to "forage", which meant sending out looting parties to nearby civilian settlements to steal their grain supplies and likely condemn them to starvation. Sieges fall into the same time.

But civilization marches on. Wartime rape is considered a war crime. Food logistics are not a big issue in most contexts. International humanitarian law recognizes that starvation is no longer a valid weapon of war.

Most damningly, just about nobody believes that starvation is effective against Hamas. If for every kid which starved to death, a Hamas militant also starved to death, I would grudgingly grant you that this might be a better way to defeat them than bombs. Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want. "Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool. Assuming they have food stashes, you would have to starve most of Gaza to death before the shortages will really affect them.

Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids. While you might claim that the actual goal is to hit the Hamas guy, it is very predictable that all your bullets will hit the kids and be stopped long before they reach the baddie.

"Join Hamas, feed your family" is probably a great recruiting tool.

So is "hey your baby/sister/mom/friend/polycule member starved to death in your arms, want to blow up the people we feel are responsible?"

International humanitarian law recognizes that starvation is no longer a valid weapon of war.

Indeed, which is why Hamas should stop starving the populace of Gaza.

Hamas, as the governing body (such as it is), is the one obligated to provide for their own people's food. This whole thing is predicated on the idea that feeding Gaza is the job of literally anyone else on the planet except the actual people who are responsible for doing so.

Look at Northern Ireland. The greatest recruiting campaigns for the IRA were when the British Army did something stupid and cruel.

If you're a Palestinian, your choice is between "Trust the Israelis and the IDF, the same IDF targeting hospitals, the same IDF shooting kids collecting water. Or Hamas, who may be sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches".

Hamas, as the governing body (such as it is), is the one obligated to provide for their own people's food. This whole thing is predicated on the idea that feeding Gaza is the job of literally anyone else on the planet except the actual people who are responsible for doing so.

I would say that it is not Israel's responsibility to feed the civilian population in Hamas-controlled territories. However, they are obliged to let in humanitarian aid. From my understanding, Israel's refusal to let the trucks in is why Gaza is starving, not because the international community is unwilling to buy food for Gaza.

If Hamas were to burn food as it enters Gaza, then you would be correct to say that Hamas is starving Gaza (but my model of them says they would not actually do that).

Likewise, while you can blame the Soviets for much starvation, you can not blame them for the starvation during the siege of Leningrad. That blood is on the hands of the Nazis who decided not to let any food in.

Israel has been asking the UN to send the trucks in, it is the UN who has been refusing to do so as long as the Israelis are the ones distributing it.

Please forward me a link to that. I'm hearing that the Israelis do things like deliberately route aid convoys the long way round and into territory where they will be ambushed and robbed, and similar fun things like that. Oh those wacky Zionist boys, such a sense of humour!

What I'm hearing is the Israeli ambassador claiming this, and at this point I don't believe one word out of any Israeli officials, not even "water is wet". They pulled their ambassador out because apparently us here in Ireland are so anti-Israel or pro-Palestine, maybe that's why their army is shooting at our diplomats. And our peacekeeping troops.

Okay, maybe I believe the words of the likes of this Israeli minister, because he's not pretending about what's going on:

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu said Thursday that Israel is advancing the destruction of Gaza, and that the Strip will be made totally Jewish, drawing outcry among opposition politicians and eventually from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

“The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu told Haredi radio station Kol Barama. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.'”

Eliyahu said that Gaza will be cleared for Jewish settlement and that Jewish towns won’t be “fenced in inside cantons.”

“All Gaza will be Jewish,” he said, though he clarified that Arabs who are loyal to Israel will be tolerated.

“We aren’t racists,” the far-right Otzma Yehudit politician added. “We are fighting those who fight us.”

Eliyahu also denied that Gazans are not getting enough food, calling it a campaign against Israel, but noted that the country was at war and trying to kill “these monsters.”

“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” he said. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”

I mean I can give you links, but they're all going to add up to "Israeli official says they're not stopping the UN" so I don't think that will do much for you, since you are unwilling to believe anything an Israeli official says.

The AP:

Israel says it doesn’t limit the truckloads of aid coming into Gaza and that assessments of roads in Gaza are conducted weekly where it looks for the best ways to provide access for the international community.

Col. Abdullah Halaby, a top official in COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of transferring aid to the territory, said there are several crossings open.

“We encourage our friends and our colleagues from the international community to do the collection, and to distribute the humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza,” he said.

An Israeli security official who was not allowed to be named in line with military procedures told reporters this week that the U.N. wanted to use roads that were not approved.

He said the army offered to escort the aid groups but they refused.

The U.N. says being escorted by Israel’s army could bring harm to civilians, citing shootings and killings by Israeli troops surrounding aid operations.

MSN:

Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy ultimately accused the UN of “unforgivable negligence” in its actions preventing food from reaching Gaza.

“The failure of the UN aid mechanism in Gaza is truly catastrophic. 600 trucks’ worth of food the IDF is urging the UN to pick up. I saw mountains of pasta, lentils, hummus, cooking oil, sugar, and flour,” he wrote on X, accompanying a video of him walking among aid supplies.

For its part, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said trucks traversing Gaza have to contend with traveling through an active war zone, along with hoards of desperate people rushing to get the supplies, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Criminal gangs have also previously attempted to ransack the vehicles as they enter the Strip.

“Taken together, these factors have put people and humanitarian staff at grave risk and forced aid agencies on many occasions to pause the collection of cargo from crossings controlled by the Israeli authorities,” OCHA said in a statement last week.

Interesting that the AP claims the UN doesn't want military escorts because it could bring harm to civilians, while MSN gives us the UN claiming they can't send their aid in because their trucks might be ransacked by gangs. So which is it: do they not want an escort because of potential civilian harms, or are they saying they can't do it without an escort because they'll get robbed? It seems to me that they just want the new Israeli aid organization to fail so that they will let UNRWA back in, and any excuse to keep aid out of Gaza is good enough to blame on the Israelis.

Does Hamas control anything at this point, in the sense that I could go to an office and talk to my local boss to get something?

If it is damning of anyone it is damning of the Hamas militant. I do not recall any Western warrior mythos that would permit a warrior to hide behind children. At most it would happen once before the warrior realizes that the enemy is actually not bluffing, and then comes out to fight.

Guerrilla warfare certainly isn't uniquely Western but is positively viewed and admired. Most Americans seem to have broadly positive views of the Viet Cong, whose calling card was using innocent villagers as cover.

Most Americans seem to have broadly positive views of the Viet Cong, whose calling card was using innocent villagers as cover.

"The Vietname war was a mistake" is a common sentiment among Americans, but "the VC were good guys" is not.

Okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but Westerners don't have a problem with guerrilla tactics if it's their side doing it.

There is a moral universe of difference between ambushing patrols in the jungle versus using your children as human shields, or holding a gun to the stomachs of your own pregnant women to threaten your enemy into compliance. The latter in particular literally assumes that your enemy is morally superior to you.

I do not believe that "Americans who think positively of Viet Cong" and "Americans who know Viet Cong's calling card was using innocent villagers as cover" are sets that overlap too much.

It isn't necessary to starve Hamas, merely to deprive them of money. Hamas's allies in the various NGOs and aid organizations help them steal most of the food that comes into Gaza, far more than they can eat themselves. They then sell that food to the starving civilians at high prices, which nets them millions of dollars to fund their war effort.

Israel is under no obligation to help the UN finance a terrorist organization.

There is no exception to the requirement to let humanitarian aid through if your enemy uses it to gain a financial advantage.

Also, I doubt that the average Gazan has a lot of savings which they could pay Hamas by now, and Hamas certainly has other ways to extract any resources from the Gazan population. For example, they might require a donation to be exempt from human shield duty. Also, flooding Gaza with food (to the degree that NGOs are able to provide it) would likely collapse the food prices in Gaza and cut out that stream of resources for Hamas.

Realistically, most of the funding of Hamas probably comes from Iran anyhow.

Flooding Gaza with food would lead to Hamas taking it all, selling it to Gazans, and destroying that part that they can't sell.

It's not as if having excess food means that the food goes to people who need it. Hamas is just as capable of taking excess food as they are of taking necessary food.

I am not aware of any requirement that would need an exception to be made. Allowing neutral actors to provide humanitarian aid to civilians is one thing. Allowing hostile actors to aid and abet active combatants is something else entirely. As a credible case has been made that this falls under the latter rather than the former, I don't think there is any international law that actually requires the Israelis to do anything.

As a rule of thumb, international agreements never require states to do anything that would be to their strategic disadvantage. If they did then no state would ever agree to them in the first place. That's why they only ban weapons that are too impractical to actually use, like mustard gas and bioweapons. Nobody would ever seriously suggest banning stealth bombers or cruise missiles, because none of the states that have those things would ever agree to stop using them.

Instead, Hamas is not affected by starvation at all, because where they are in control they will obviously take what food they want.

That's exactly why Israel needs to do it: it is impossible to prevent civilians from starving because Hamas takes all the food. Israel taking the food affects only Hamas (although there are plenty of civilians to point to, who will be starved regardless of what Israel does but who can be blamed on Israel.)

Starvation is a bit like firing a machine gun towards a Hamas militant hiding behind dozens of rows of Gazan kids

Which you may have to do (at least to the extent of getting blamed for killing them). Hamas hiding behind civilians and forcing Israel to kill them, or to look like they're trying to kill them, has been a ubiquitous tactic already.

it is impossible to prevent civilians from starving because Hamas takes all the food.

Pretty much no one was starving to death before Israel implemented more stringent aid restrictions this March.

Almost everyone claiming that Gazans are starving now has been claiming the very same thing since the war started.

There's been widespread malnutrition and hunger of course, but few actual deaths directly from starvation until recently.

Again, everyone (apart from you) claiming that people are dying of starvation now has been claiming this since the end of 2023.

I thought Gaza has been continuously starving for 40+ years. I was told this, anyways. Despite the massive population growth.

Gaza pre war had an obesity problem. I don't think anyone was accusing them of being underfed.

The aid organizations were helping Hamas and had to be stopped regardless of whether they were also providing food.

I'd also ask just how much "pretty much no one" is and how many are starving now. Hamas is known to have used food to control the people even before October 7, so I do not believe "nobody used to be starving".

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