Hunger War Games

“I haven’t eaten for days,” the shaggy-haired, bearded young man says. “Every day my body becomes weaker.” His arms, his legs look like twigs. Every rib, the line of his scapula protrude in his shirtless torso. He is standing in a dark narrow tunnel, gripping a shovel, and he begins digging in the dirt. “What I’m doing now is digging my own grave,” he explains, before sinking to the ground to cry.

This is Evyatar David, a talented guitarist from a musical family, kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023 from the Nova music festival. Hamas released this video of him a few days ago. At one point, Evyatar’s captor offers him a can to drink. Only the captor’s arm is seen, but that man’s arm is entirely unlike the hostage’s. The captor’s arm is that of a man who is clearly strong and well-fed. He presents the other man this drink, in a grotesque pantomime of kindness.

In a remotely moral universe, there would be an explosion of outrage against the man deliberately starving his captive and forcing him to dig his own grave. And yet here we are. So confident is Hamas of the world’s continued sympathy, they have released proof of their own depravity, knowing it will be seized on to indict not them, but Israel.

We are witnessing the triumph of starvation porn. One side in Gaza flaunts the emaciated body of the Jew it is torturing underground, while the other side, the Jews, are condemned as monstrous starvers of innocents. 

I don’t doubt that the Israeli government has made mistakes in its war in Gaza. No government could possibly prosecute a war in a dense urban environment, against terrorists who hide behind their own people, without making any mistakes. As Haviv Rettig Gur explained recently in The Free Press, Israel miscalculated when they cut off aid to Gaza in March. They didn’t do that out of cruelty, but because they’d brought hundreds of thousands of tons of aid into Gaza during the ceasefire from January to March and thought there was enough food there to last six months. They basically played chicken with Hamas, expecting the group to start releasing hostages in order for aid to resume.

But the food ran out sooner than expected, presumably because Hamas and other Gazans had stockpiled it, and the idea of using aid as pressure on Hamas had a fatal misunderstanding at its very core. “Why would Hamas blink first?” Gur asks. “Has the Israeli government met Hamas?” As food began running scarce, or could plausibly be said to be running scarce, Hamas saw a brilliant opportunity. They howled that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza, and their stenographers in the U.N. and Western media ran with it.

It’s hard to sort fact from fiction where Gaza is concerned, but it seems hunger is increasing. There’s reason to wonder how pervasive or severe it is, however — from the earliest days of the war, Israel’s critics have claimed Gaza is in the grip of widespread starvation or even famine. So maybe it wasn’t true then, but it is now? If Gaza is full of skin-and-bones children, it seems odd that the photographs purporting to show them — the horrifying images that have been splashed across social media and on newspaper front pages these past few weeks — have invariably turned out to be from places like Yemen, or actually show a child suffering from a terrible wasting disease. 

Yet Israel’s defenders don’t generally like taking potshots at the starvation claims, because it’s all too easy for their opponents to say they are heartless, and they don’t want to think of themselves that way. Palestinian civilians shouldn’t need to become walking skeletons — like Evyatar David — to be worthy of sympathy. Being unable to access food should be enough. Even though no country in history, ever, has been expected to feed the population it’s at war with, hearts rightly soften when innocents suffer. Kind-hearted Jews and others who defend Israel long to curtail this suffering, so long as it doesn’t hinder the war effort.

Except achieving this isn’t so simple. Huge quantities of donated food have streamed into Gaza, but Hamas has been stealing it to keep themselves in power. Two months ago the U.S.-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation came in to circumvent this problem, but from the beginning Hamas sabotaged and attacked them. After stoking violence near the distribution centers, Hamas claimed again and again that Israel fired at starving Palestinians, and the Western media went into overdrive to spread their accusations around the world.

If Hamas cared about Palestinian suffering, they would give up the hostages they’re holding and surrender. They don’t do that because every dead or ailing Palestinian is a public relations bonanza for them. They know that although they are losing the military war, they are winning the global disinformation war. This was underlined recently by France, the U.K. and Canada, which pledged that they will recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N. General Assembly in September. Britain’s Keir Starmer stated that their recognition will come if there is no ceasefire by then – juicy inducement for Hamas to do anything but release the hostages and agree to a ceasefire, and just hold on until September, when well-heeled Westerners will reward the Palestinians with the promise of a state. It is obscene. 

Hamas actually wants Palestinians to die — or at least, more to the point, to be seen dying. This is another thing good-hearted people hesitate to say, because it sounds like demonizing Arabs. No one, people think, could be so monstrous. Decent people are rightly suspicious of wartime attempts to whip up emotion against the enemy. And yet the evidence is there. The Hamas leadership has demonstrated enough concern for themselves to live in luxury with stolen money, but Palestinian lives are expendable. Gazans are deemed valuable only insofar as Hamas can sacrifice them in pursuit of their obsession to destroy the Jewish state. They want to kill Jews, and are indifferent to Palestinian life.

Sometimes the enemy really is that evil. The Jews should know this better than anyone. And throughout history, when the world feels the need to name a certain group of people as inhuman, they have selected the Jews. Eighty years after the Holocaust, that terrifying script is playing out again, as voices rise around the world to condemn the Jews as killers of babies, the contagion that must be eliminated.

Now they accuse Israel of starving Palestinian children even as they starve the hostages, and their blood libel is broadcast by lying liars who lie. Meanwhile Evyatan David remains in the dark, steps from the grave he was ordered to dig for himself. And the world is silent.

Absolutely everything about the dismal situation in Gaza is Hamas’ fault. Israel’s flaws and missteps don’t begin to compare with what Hamas has done deliberately, cynically, hoping to bring about the maximum number of deaths of not only Israelis, but their own people. They started this war by carrying out the most horrific slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, they refuse to give up the 50 hostages, dead and alive, they still hold, and they’ve ensured that Palestinian civilians will die, no matter how careful Israel is, by placing themselves and their weapons under schools, hospitals and homes. Now they accuse Israel of starving Palestinian children even as they starve the hostages, and their blood libel is broadcast by lying liars who lie. 

Meanwhile Evyatan David remains in the dark, steps from the grave he was ordered to dig for himself. And the world is silent.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”