Kids are starving. Get the popcorn.
There are starving children in Gaza, and as tax season approaches, you’re paying to starve them.
The indiscriminate bombings weren’t enough for the US to change course on Israel. After the century we’ve had, we’re accustomed to seeing little hands sticking out of rubble, I guess. (“What would you have Israel do to make sure October 7th never happens again!?” Good question. I would have them take out the Hamas leadership using their sophisticated surveillance and precise military technology, then build a buffer, and station the right amount of soldiers on it, instead of keeping the soldiers in the West Bank to help settlers steal land).
The obliterated homes, hospitals, schools, universities; the journalists snipered through their press passes, weren’t enough. The doctors detained and forced to kneel on the ground blindfolded and unclothed. The rape, humiliation, the disease—when will enough be enough? It becomes normalized, the public’s psyche slowly boiling like the proverbial frog to mushily absorb ever-greater horror. When Israel bombed the first hospital it was scandalous enough to warrant a cover-up; the Israeli government said an errant Hamas rocket had slammed into the building. Now, all of the working hospitals have been destroyed. It’s the new normal.
What remains to be seen is, will images of starvation be enough for the US to change course? There have been a few stories and pictures of hunger. Soon they’ll be as ubiquitous as pictures are now of parents screaming in agony. The dead kids look like angels who are sleeping. But sad, tiny skeletons with giant, dead-looking eyes, covered in flies they don’t have the strength to swat off? Will that be enough for Joe Biden?
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Aid trucks carrying medicine and food from Egypt pass through the border city of Kerem Shalom. There, protestors try to block their progress. The passage is already stalled by seemingly arbitrary, occasionally cruel, checks and stops by the IDF.
Recently, the protestors set up a children’s bouncy castle in the path of the aid trucks, reports the Washington Post. They’re going to have a party.
“Get ready, there will be inflatables, cotton candy, and popcorn and slushies,” said a settler, the Washington Post reports. “We are preparing for the people of Israel, come.”
In December, Arif Husain, the chief economist of the U.N. World Food Program, told the New Yorker that hunger in Gaza had tipped into crisis. “In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Husain said.
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