by Paul Larudee*
April 28, 2025
Today the World Food Program, the biggest supplier of food to Gaza, ran out of food. Its supplies inside Gaza are gone, and Israel is allowing no food, no water, no medical supplies or anything else to get in. The WFP distributed the last of its food, mainly to kitchens that feed as many hungry as they can, perhaps enough for a few days more. Send as much money as you like to relief agencies and to persons in Gaza. Few will find anything to buy.
After that, there are the hoarders and smugglers, both Israeli and Palestinian, who will make money, while reserving enough for themselves. They will hide in their closets to eat, and will have to find ways to protect themselves from the starving skeletons that will try to feed themselves by any means possible.
Adults in good health can survive without food for 2-3 months. But how many in Gaza are adults, and how many in good health? And if they don’t have enough clean drinking water, they might last much shorter in their weakened state. That describes the rule, rather than the exception.
That’s Israel’s plan. It has destroyed everything that sustains life: the pitiful attempts at agriculture, the bakeries, the animals, the food storage centers, the water treatment facilities, the sanitary and hygiene infrastructure, the hospitals, the shelters, everything. If they can manage this for 90 days, there will be only two million skeletons and lots of rubble to bulldoze. Not even insects or vermin, which will have long since been consumed by the skeletons. Perhaps even the skeletons will have been consumed by skeletons. The most vulnerable will die in the first month, but the pace will accelerate in the second, and then taper off to nothing by the end of the third.
That’s Israel’s plan. They don’t mind if the population flees Gaza or is carted away by some other country. But it seems unlikely. Gaza’s only borders are with Israel, Egypt and the sea. Egypt will not take them. Israel will not take them. Only the sea will take them, with the same but quicker results as remaining in Gaza.
What will the world do? We know what the US will do. It will supply the weapons and economic support to enable Israel to fulfill its plan. Some of the European nations and their allies will do the same. Most of the rest will sit on their hands while simultaneously wringing them, which is not as difficult as it sounds. Much of the world will follow suit, to the refrain of “What can we do?” Yemen is the only country, along with some non-state actors in the Axis of Resistance, that will do its part to destroy the perpetrator of the greatest crime of our century as it happens before our eyes.
And what will we do? Write letter and articles like this one? Demonstrate? Call corrupt and criminal elected representatives? Obtain legal judgments against Israel and its leadership in court? Resolutions at the UN? Will we destroy the interests and the representatives of the criminal enterprise in our own countries and communities? Will we assure that everything Israeli will be subjected to expurgation from our societies until Israel ceases and desists from committing the unspeakable?
Will we? I’ll check back with you in 90 days.
*Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization.
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