Israeli public figures call for ‘crippling sanctions’ on Israel over Gaza starvation

Peter Beaumont
Jul 29, 2025

Thirty-one high-profile Israelis express shame over ‘brutal campaign’ and demand permanent ceasefire in letter

A group of high-profile Israeli public figures, including academics, artists and public intellectuals, has called for “crippling sanctions” to be imposed by the international community on Israel, amid mounting horror over its starvation of Gaza.

The 31 signatories of a letter to the Guardian include an Academy award recipient, Yuval Abraham; a former Israeli attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair; Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel’s parliament and former head of the Jewish Agency; and a number of recipients of the prestigious Israel prize, Israel’s highest cultural honour.

The figures come from the worlds of poetry, science, journalism and academia, and the letter accuses Israel of “starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the strip”.

It adds: “The international community must impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire.”

The letter is significant both for its unvarnished criticism of Israel and for breaking the taboo of endorsing stringent international sanctions, in a country where politicians have promoted laws targeting those advocating such measures.

Among other signatories are the painter Michal Na’aman; Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, an award-winning documentary filmmaker; Samuel Maoz, the director of the Golden Lion-winning film Lebanon; the poet Aharon Shabtai and the choreographer Inbal Pinto.

The letter was published as it was announced that more than 60,000 Palestinians had been killed in the 21-month Israel-Gaza war, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

On Monday two well-known Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, released reports assessing for the first time that Israel was conducting a “genocidal” policy against Palestinians in Gaza, breaking another taboo.

On Sunday the Reform movement, the largest Jewish denomination in the US, said the Israeli government was “culpable” in Gaza’s spreading famine.

“No one should be unaffected by the pervasive hunger experienced by thousands of Gazans. No one should spend the bulk of their time arguing technical definitions between starvation and pervasive hunger.

“The situation is dire, and it is deadly. Nor should we accept arguments that because Hamas is the primary reason many Gazans are either starving or on the verge of starving, that the Jewish state is not also culpable in this human disaster. The primary moral response must begin with anguished hearts in the face of such a large-scale human tragedy.

“Blocking food, water, medicine, and power – especially for children – is indefensible,” it said. “Let us not allow our grief to harden into indifference, nor our love for Israel to blind us to the cries of the vulnerable. Let us rise to the moral challenge of this moment.”

The latest interventions follow comments earlier this month by the former Israel prime minister Ehud Olmert, who told the Guardian that a “humanitarian city” Israel’s defence minister has proposed building on the ruins of Rafah would be a concentration camp, and forcing Palestinians inside would amount to ethnic cleansing.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, officials and rightwing NGOs have continued to deny the existence of famine in Gaza caused by Israel.

That has occurred in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including the UN’s exacting and data-based food security monitor, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification mechanism, and Donald Trump’s acknowledgment of “real starvation” in the coastal strip.

The Israeli government has been contacted for comment.

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